lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

LYRICALPOETRYThe ecstasy of joy and of sorrow, of love and death—these have been at all times the burden of song, clearlyand simply uttered in the songs of the people, subtilisedand complicated in more courtly and literary poetry.These are perennial themes; but there have beenepochs when large sections of the human race havebeen caught up into an infective mood of ecstasy, asat a religious revival; and these movements have beenof an enduring character, at least in their effects,leaving their record in literature and not least in lyricalpoetry. Such was the effect of the coming of Christianity,and its lyrical expression is the Greek and Latinhymns. Such again was the great awakening of thespirit of man in France and Western Europe at theend of the eleventh century which gave us the songsof the troubadours and all that derived from them.Such, too, in a way and measure, was the period atthe end of the eighteenth century when a variety ofcauses—literary, political, and religious—combined toevoke a mood more justly called lyrical than romantic,the record of which is the poetry of Blake and Wordsworthand Shelley and Keats and in a way Scott andByron, and the successive phases of which make upthe history of poetry in the nineteenth century.There is, as I have said at the opening of this lecture,a lyrical, rhapsodical vein in much of this poetry whichis not lyrical in form. But much, and perhaps thebest of it, is lyrical in form also, and it is with this thatI propose to deal.18