Understanding the Lyric Genre

The Lyric Genre

• Human language primarily serves communication to transmit information between an emitter and receiver but can also serve other functions.
• The poetic function arises when the emitter aims to focus the receiver on the message itself.
• This combines practical communication with aesthetic creation, intending to evoke beauty.
• In literary language, words are an end in themselves with the objective to attract the reader's attention, create sensations, images, and inspire beauty within the receiver.
• Literary texts can be classified in a general manner into narrative, lyrical, and dramatic genres

Lyric Genre

• The lyric genre consists of expressing subjectivity through words.
• Authors aim to convey feelings or emotions through rhythm or the creation of images.
• The typical form is verse, some examples include written prose and narrative in verse, like the epic subgenre.
• Lyric genre characteristics include first person representation, subjectivity, brevity, and elaboration
• First person viewpoint represents the author's voice, establishing an intimate and sincere connection with the reader.
• Subjectivity allows the poet's feelings to influence the elements of nature, altering space and time.
• Brevity enables the concentration of intense emotion into a few verses.
• Elaboration makes use of carefully crafted language that works with metrics, verses, accents, stanzas, and sounds, involving literary figures and connotative words, over denotative ones.
• The lyric explores universal themes: death, love, time, solitude, or nature, along with everyday objects.

Subgenres:

Lírica Amorosa

• This covers emotions and experiences surrounding the birth of love, passion, its development, and its conclusion

Lírica Intelectual

• Dedicated to addressing ideas, thoughts, or themes related to culture

Lírica Existencialista

• Centers on philosophical questions, like death, the meaning of life, and destiny

Lírica Social

• Dedicated to denouncing social differences and political conditions of a country, often focused on the life of the most disadvantaged classes

Verse

• Verse combines words in a unique organized way to create a musical effect, requiring pauses at the end of each line when read.
• Verses are analyzed based on the number of syllables they contain.
• The syllable count in poetry can differ from grammatical syllables because poets use resources to shape rhythm.

Resources:

Sinalefa

• Merging the final vowel of one word with the initial vowel of the next, counting as one syllable

Sinéresis

• Joining two vowels that form a hiatus into one syllable within a word, counting as one syllable

Diéresis

• Separating a diphthong into two distinct syllables, adding one syllable to the count

• The poet counts based on the last word of the verse (rules):

Aguda

• Add one syllable to the grammatical syllables

Llana

• Syllables are counted

Esdrújula

• Subtract one syllable from the actual syllables

Types of verse:

Versos de arte menor

• Use up to eight syllables: bisílabos (2), trisílabos (3), tetrasílabos (4), pentasílabos (5), hexasílabos (6), heptasílabos (7), and octosílabos (8).

Versos de arte mayor

• Use more than eight syllables: eneasílabos (9), decasílabos (10), endecasílabos (11), dodecasílabos (12), and alejandrinos (14)

Rhyme

• Rhyme consists of the repetition of phonemes, in two or more verses, from the last stressed vowel onwards.
• Although a phenomenon is acoustic and not orthographic, sounds coincide, but not letters.

Types of rhyme:

Rima Consonante

• All sounds (vowels and consonants) are repeated

Rima Asonante

• Only vowel sounds are repeated

Stanzas

• A stanza is a set of verses adjusted to a measure and constant rhythm, as set by poetic tradition, with exceptions.
• Poems may be non-stanzaic, lacking internal separation.
• Stanzas are classified according to the number of verses

Estrofas de dos versos:

Pareado

• Consist of two verses that may be of arte mayor or menor, using assonance or consonance
• aa, AA

Estrofas de tres versos:

Terceto

• Consist of three verses of arte mayor that are consonant
• ABA
• Typically forms chained tercets (ABA / BCB / CDC)

Estrofas de cuatro versos:

Cuarteto

• Consists of four verses of arte mayor and consonant rhyme, with the first verse rhymes with the last, and the second with the third.
• ABBA

Serventesio

• Consists of four verses of arte mayor and consonant rhyme, with rhymes between the first and third verses, and the second and fourth.
• ABAB

Redondilla

• Same as the quartet (abba), but used in arte menor.

Cuarteta

• Is the same as the serventesio (abab), but used in arte menor.

Copla

• Consists of a four-verse stanza with assonant rhyme, where only even verses rhyme (-a-a), often intended for singing

Cuaderna Vía

• Consists of four alexandrine verses with rhyme in all verses
• AAAA
• Typical stanza of Middle Ages

Estrofas de cinco versos:

Quintilla

• Consists of five octosyllabic verses that can rhyme, but never with three consecutive verses, nor can the last two rhyme in pairs, and cannot be without rhyme

Quinteto

• The quintilla makes use of verses of arte mayor

Lira

• Combination of heptasyllabic and hendecasyllabic verses making use of consonate rime
• The distribution being: 7a 11B 7a 7b 11B

Literary Language

• In literature, writers choose words to call attention to themselves, their form, and content.
• The resources used are literary, rhetorical figures, or literary resources, that vary by type.

Figures of the phonic level:

Encabalgamiento

• In the Spanish language, combinations of words do not allow for pauses between then.
• If a line break is placed in the middle of those combinations, an encabalgamiento is produced.

Aliteración

• The repetition of one or more identical sounds in a verse or stanza.

Onomatopeya

• Imitating real-world sounds through phonetic procedures

Paronomasia

• Placing two or more terms with phonetic similarity but without a relation of meaning

Figures of the morphosyntactic level:

Anáfora

• Repetition of one or more words at the start of consecutive verses or sentences

Epífora

• Repetition of one or more words at the end of consecutive verses or sentences

Paralelismo

• Repeating a same verse or structure.

Asíndeton

• Removing needed or habitual conjunctions to make a sentence.

Polisíndeton

• Repeating connections.

Hipérbaton

• Inversion of the logical order of a sentence or the order of a group of words

Pleonasmo

• Adding unnecessary or repetitive words for understanding

Epíteto

• Descriptive adjective with meaning already implied by the noun it accompanies

Figures of the semantic level:

Prosopografía

• Physical description

Enumeración

• A list of nouns or adjectives

Interrogación Retórica

• Rhetorical question with no expected answer

Tropos:

Apóstrofe

• Used to call with insistence to a real or imaginary being.

Hipérbole

• Involves exaggeration.

Personificación

• Granting human characteristics to animals or objects.

Antítesis

• Opposition of two words, phrases, or ideas with opposite meanings

Símil o comparación

• Comparing two facts, people, or objects

Oxímoron

• Oxymoron is the combination, in one word or expression, of two terms of contradictory meaning.

Derivación

• Derivation forms words.

Metáfora

• Identifying two terms based on a relationship created by the writer

Sinestesia

• Associating contradictory or unrelated sensations.

Alegoría

• It is an ongoing metaphor.

Metonimia

• Substitute one word for another.