Lyric poetry is a broad category of poetry that encompasses most of what the average person means when they say the word "poetry." While a lyric poem doesn't have to be sung (it is not the same as "lyrics"), most lyric poems are structured in rhythmic lines and stanzas, usually with rhymes, so they sound somewhat like songs. Sonnets, odes, and elegies are examples of genres that qualify as lyric poetry. Another defining characteristic of the lyric poem is that it is usually written as the poet's reflection or in the voice of an assumed persona.
With this in mind, we can examine some examples of poems that qualify and do not qualify as lyric poetry. Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is lyric poetry. It consists of four rhyming stanzas in iambic tetrameter, spoken as a reflection by the persona "I." Robert Frost's poem "Death of the Hired Man" is not a lyric poem. It is a dramatic dialogue written in blank verse and features the voices of two characters discussing a third person.
Imagist poems would not usually be classified as lyric poetry. The concept behind imagism is to capture a single image as a snapshot in words. An imagist poem usually doesn't rhyme, and it doesn't have regular rhythm or meter. It's also very short. "In a Station in the Metro" by Ezra Pound is an example:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Similarly, Japanese styles of poetry such as haiku are not considered lyric poetry. Haiku is a three-line poem in seventeen syllables.
Most poems written in traditional verse form are likely to fall into the category of lyric poetry.
http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/terms/L/lyric.htm
In addition to lyric and narrative poetry, there is dramatic poetry, and this terms refers to drama that is written in verse and, typically, meant to be performed. Dramatic poetry has a plot, like narrative poetry. Often, it takes the form of a dramatic monologue. One such example of a dramatic poem is Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess," a poem narrated by a duke who apparently had his former wife, his last duchess, murdered, because he was displeased with her behavior. He is speaking to a representative for another nobleman, whose daughter he is making arrangements to marry. We find a second example of dramatic poetry in another of Browning's poems, "Porphyria's Lover." This poem is narrated by a person who knows his lover, Porphyria, loves him deeply, but says that she must leave him, because their love would be socially unacceptable. We do not know why: it could be a class difference, could be that both partners are of the same sex, that one of them is married, or it could be something else entirely. As a result, the narrator decides to strangle Porphyria with her long, blond hair, and in this way, the narrator is able to keep her with him forever.
Lyric poetry is a very general category. A lyric poem can be any poem about feelings or ideas, usually expressed by a speaker. A lyric poem does not have to have a plot or characters or tell a story. A narrative poem, on the other hand, must tell a story. Thus, the narrative poem will have a plot, characters, conflict, and theme(s). Some famous examples of narrative poems include Poe's "The Raven" and Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade." An epic is a long narrative poem, often about a hero, that tells us about the values of a culture. Examples include Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, as well as the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf.
Lyric poems do not have to rhyme but they tend to be musical due to a meter and/or rhyme scheme. There are different subcategories of lyric poems, such as elegy or ode. An elegy is a lyric poem about someone who has died (Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"), while an ode is usually a poem that celebrates or appreciates a person, object, or idea (Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn"). However, a lyric poem can simply be any poem in which a speaker expresses feelings or emotions, or meditates or reflects on any subject.
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