Definition
A definition of “lyric poetry” that is both capacious and historically informed requires placing the term within the context of a longer and broader critical and poetic tradition, especially since current critical understanding of lyric poetry is very expansive. In critical discourse, “lyric poetry” has evolved from mode (a situation of enunciating where the poet speaks in his own name, as understood by Plato) to genre (as one of three general categories of poetic literature, the other two being narrative or epic, and dramatic) and also includes form. Since lyric poetry, in the form of odes, elegies, sonnets, etc., did not “imitate” “men in action,” a mode privileged by the Greeks, being expressive of authors’ ideas or feelings instead, to promote its poetic status and to integrate lyric poetry into classical poetics, theorists asserted that the “imitation” was an “imitation of feeling.” Simply put, in “epic and dramatic poetry, one imitates actions and customs; in the...
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
References
Primary Sources
An Old Maid [Dora Greenwell]. 1862, February. My life, and what shall I do with it? (Our single women). The North British Review 36 (71), 62–87.
Antiquus. [Mill, J. S.]. 1833a, January. What is poetry? Monthly Repository 7 (73), 60–70.
———. [Mill, J. S.]. 1833b, August. The two kinds of poetry. Monthly Repository 7 (80), 714–724.
Aristotle, c. 335-322 B. C.; 1932. The Poetics. In Aristotle’s theory of poetry and fine art with a critical text and translation of the poetics(S.H. Butcher, Ed., 4th ed., pp. 7–111). London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd.
Arnold, M. 1880; 1888; 1973. The study of poetry. In The complete prose works of Matthew Arnold, Vol. 9 (R. Super, Ed., pp. 161–188). Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Browning, E. B. 2016. The works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Vols. 1–5 (S. Donaldson, M. Stone, B. Taylor, and R. Patteson, Eds). London and New York: Routledge.
Eliot, T.S. 1953; 2014. The three voices of poetry. In The lyric theory reader: A critical anthology(V. Jackson and Y. Prins, Eds., pp. 192–200). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Field, M. [Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper]. 1889. Long ago. London: George Bell and Sons.
Field, M. 1908. Wild honey from various thyme. London: T. Fisher Unwin.
Greenwell, D. 1867. Poems. London: Alexander Strahan.
Hallam, A.H. 1831, August. On some of the characteristics of modern poetry, and on the lyrical poems of Alfred Tennyson. The Englishman’s Magazine 1 (5), 616–628.
Hopkins, G. M. 1873; 1959. Lecture notes: Rhetoric: rhythm and the other structural parts of rhetoric – verse; Poetry and verse. In The journals and papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins(H. House and G. Storey, Eds., pp. 267–288; 289–290). London/New York/Toronto: Oxford University Press.
Ingelow, J. n.d. The poetical works of Jean Ingelow: reprinted from the three-volume English edition, with many additions. New York: A. L. Burt.
Keble, J. 1827. The Christian year: thoughts in verse for the Sundays and Holy-Days throughout the year. London/New York: Walter Scott.
Landon, L.E. (L.E.L.) 1832, November. On the ancient and modern influence of poetry. The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, Jan. 1821-Dec. 1836; 35(143), 466–471.
Levy, A. 1887, November. The poetry of Christina Rossetti. Woman’s World I, 178–180.
Plato, c. 370 B. C.; 1941 (?). Plato’s The Republic, Book X. (B. Jowett, Trans., pp. 360–380). New York: The Modern Library.
Plato, c. 390 B. C. Ion (B. Jowett, Trans.). https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1635/1635-h/1635-h.htm.
Meynell, A. 1917. Some thoughts of a reader of Tennyson. In Hearts of controversy, 1968 reprint (pp. 1–22). Freeport: Books for Libraries Press.
Newman, J.H.C. 1890; 1968. Apologia pro vita sua, ed. D. J. DeLaura. London/New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Procter, A. 1880. The poems of Adelaide A. Procter: complete edition with an introduction by Charles Dickens. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell.
Rossetti, C. 2001. The complete poems.Ed. R. W. Crump. London and New York: Penguin Books, Ltd.
Shelley, P.B. 1821; 1921. A defence of poetry. In Peacock’s four ages of poetry, Shelley’s defense of poetry, Browning’s essay on Shelley(H.F.B. Brett-Smith, Ed., pp. 23–59). Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Sidney, P. 1595; 1891. An apologie for poetrie by Sir Philip Sidney. Ed. E. Shuckburgh. Cambridge: The University Press.
Symons, A. 1887. Miss Rossetti’s poetry. The London Quarterly Review, 68, 338–350.
———. 1889; 2014. The decadent movement in literature. In The symbolist movement in literature(M. Creasy, Ed., pp. 169–183). Manchester: Carcanet Press, Ltd.
Tennyson, A. 1969. The poems of Tennyson.Ed. C. Ricks. London/Harlow: Longmans/Green and Co., Ltd.
Wordsworth, W. 1802. Preface to lyrical ballads, with pastoral and other poems in two volumes, Vol. 1 (3rd Ed, pp. i–lxiv). London: Longman and Rees.
Selected Additional References
Abrams, M.H. 1971. A glossary of literary terms(3rd ed.). New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.
Abrams, M. H. 2012. The Fourth Dimension of a Poem. In The Fourth Dimension of a Poem and Other Essays(pp. 1-29). Foreword by H. Bloom. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Adams, J.E. 2009. A history of Victorian literature. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.
Blair, K. 2012. Form and faith in Victorian poetry and religion (pp. 34–51). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brower, R.A. 1951. The fields of light: an experiment in critical reading(pp. 31–41, 61–74). New York: Oxford University Press.
Culler, J. 2009; 2011. Genre: Lyric. In The work of genre: selected essays from The English Institute, 56–110. Ed. R. Warhol. Cambridge, MA: The English Institute.
Dieleman, K. 2020, September. Ecotheological relationships in Elizabeth Barrett’s “A Drama of Exile.” Christianity & Literature 69 (3), 418–438.
Frye, N. 1957; 2000. Anatomy of criticism: four essays. With a Foreword by H. Bloom. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Frye, N. 1985. Approaching lyric. In Lyric poetry: beyond New Criticism(C. Hošek and P. Parker, Eds., pp. 31–37). Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press.
Genette, G. 1979; Trans. 1992; 2014. The architext (J. Lewin, Trans.). In The lyric theory reader: a critical anthology (V. Jackson and Y. Prins, Eds., pp. 17–30). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Gezari, J. 2007. Last things: Emily Brontë’s poems. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Hassett, C. 2013. Christina Rossetti: ravens, cockatoos, and range. In The handbook of Victorian poetry(M. Bevis, Ed., pp. 445–459). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Helsinger, E. 2019. Haunted by voice. In Cambridge companion to Victorian women’s poetry (L. K. Hughes, Ed., pp. 45–58). Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Hollander, J. 1997. A poem lost and found: Jean Ingelow’s successful “Failure.” In The work of poetry (pp. 210–214). New York: Columbia University Press.
Hošek, C., and P. Parker (Eds.). 1985. Lyric poetry: beyond New Criticism. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Hu, E. 2008. Christina Rossetti, John Keble, and the Divine gaze. Victorian Poetry 46(2), 175–189.
Hughes, L. 2019a. Introduction. In L. Hughes (Ed.), Cambridge companion to Victorian women’s poetry (pp. 1–10). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
——— (Ed.). 2019b. Cambridge companion to Victorian women’s poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jackson, V. 2012. Lyric. In The Princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics(4th ed.)(R. Greene and S. Cushman, Eds., pp. 826–834). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Jackson, V. and Prins, Y., eds. 2014. The lyric theory reader: a critical anthology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Johnson, J. W. 1993. Lyric. In The new Princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics, eds. A. Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan, 713–726. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Lootens, T. 1996. Lost saints: silence, gender, and Victorian literary canonization, 158–184. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia.
McKelvy, W.R. 2007. The English cult of literature: devoted readers, 1774–1880, 127–154. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press.
Mermin, D. 1981. The female poet and the embarrassed reader: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnets from the Portuguese.”ELH 48 (2), 351–367.
———. 1993. Poetry. In Godiva’s ride: women of letters in England, 1830–1880 (pp. 60–80). Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Morgan, M. 2019. Genres. In Cambridge companion to Victorian women’s poetry, 13–27. Ed. L. K. Hughes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Parker, P. 1985. Introduction. In Lyric poetry: beyond New Criticism, 11–28. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Perloff, M. and Dworkin, C., eds. 2009. “Introduction.” In The sound of poetry, the poetry of sound, 1–17. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Phillip, C. 2018. The hymnal: a reading history. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Richards, I. A. 1929. Practical criticism: a study of literary judgment. San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace & Company.
Rowlinson, M. 2002. Lyric. In A companion to Victorian poetry, ed. R. Cronin, A. Chapman, and A. H. Harrison, 59–79. Malden/Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
Slinn, E. W. 2015. Poetry. In The encyclopedia of Victorian literature, Vol. III M-P, 1287–98. Eds. D. F. Felluga et. al. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Tennyson, G.B. 1981. Victorian devotional poetry: the Tractarian mode. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.
Thain, M. 2015. Lyric. In The encyclopedia of Victorian literature, Vol. II: E-L (D. F. Felluga, P. Gilbert, L.K.Hughes, Eds., pp. 959–965). Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Vendler, H. 1997. The art of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Watson, J.R. 1999. The English hymn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Section Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Hu, E.T. (2021). Lyric Poetry. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02721-6_317-1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02721-6_317-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-02721-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-02721-6
eBook Packages: Springer Reference Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Humanities