Lyric poetry is usually a poem with rhyming that expresses personal feelings. It need not be (but can be) set to music. Aristotle, in Poetics 1447a, merely mentions lyric poetry (kitharistike) along with drama, epic poetry, dancing, painting and other forms of mimesis. The modern concept of a lyric poem, dating from the Romantic era, does have some thematic antecedents in ancient Greek and Roman verse, but the ancient definition was based on metr...
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Lyric poetry is usually a poem with rhyming that expresses personal feelings. It need not be (but can be) set to music. Aristotle, in Poetics 1447a, merely mentions lyric poetry (kitharistike) along with drama, epic poetry, dancing, painting and other forms of mimesis. The modern concept of a lyric poem, dating from the Romantic era, does have some thematic antecedents in ancient Greek and Roman verse, but the ancient definition was based on metrical criteria, and in archaic and classical Greek culture presupposed live performance accompanied by a stringed instrument.
Although arguably the most popular form of lyric poetry in the Western tradition is the 14-line sonnet, either in its Petrarchan or its Shakespearean form, lyric poetry appears in a variety of forms. Other forms of the lyric include ballades, villanelles, minnesang, pastourelle, canzone, and stev.
Ancient Hebrew poetry relied on repetition, alliteration, and chiasmus for many of its effects. Ancient Greek and Roman lyric...
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