A Study of Poetry

by Bliss Perry

THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR

"O hearken, love, the battle-horn!
The triumph clear, the silver scorn!
O hearken where the echoes bring.
Down the grey disastrous morn,
Laughter and rallying!"
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY

CHAPTER VII

THE FIELD OF LYRIC POETRY

"'Lyrical,' it may be said, implies a form of musical utterance
in words governed by overmastering emotion and set free by a
powerfully concordant rhythm."
ERNEST RHYS, Lyric Poetry

That "confusion of the genres" which characterizes so much of contemporary art has not obliterated the ancient division of poetry into three chief types, namely, lyric, epic and dramatic. We still mean by these words very much what the Greeks meant: a "lyric" is something sung, an "epic" tells a story, a "drama" sets characters in action. Corresponding to these general purposes of the three kinds of poetry, is the difference which Watts-Dunton has discussed so suggestively: namely, that in the lyric the author reveals himself fully, while in the "epic" or narrative poem the author himself is but partly revealed, and in the drama the author is hidden behind his characters. Or, putting this difference in another way, the same critic points out that the true dramatists possess "absolute" vision, i.e. unconditioned by the personal impulses of the poet himself, whereas the vision of the lyrist is "relative," conditioned by his own situation and mood. The pure lyrist, says Watts-Dunton, has one voice and sings one tune; the epic poets and quasi-dramatists have one voice but can sing several tunes, while the true dramatists, with their objective, "absolute" vision of the world, have many tongues and can sing in all tunes.

1. A Rough Classification

Passing over the question of the historical origins of those various species of poetry, such as the relation of early hymnic songs and hero-songs to the epic, and the relation of narrative material and method to the drama, let us try to arrange in some sort of order the kinds of poetry with which we are familiar. Suppose we follow Watts-Dunton's hint, and start, as if it were from a central point, with the Pure Lyric, the expression of the Ego in song. Shelley's "Stanzas Written in Dejection near Naples," Coleridge's "Ode to Dejection," Wordsworth's "She dwelt among the untrodden ways," Tennyson's "Break—Break" will serve for illustrations. These are subjective, personal poems. Their vision is "relative" to the poet's actual circumstances. Yet in a "dramatic lyric" like Byron's "Isles of Greece" or Tennyson's "Sir Galahad" it is clear that the poet's vision is not occupied primarily with himself, but with another person. In a dramatic monologue like Tennyson's "Simeon Stylites" or Browning's "The Bishop orders his Tomb in St. Praxed's Church" it is not Tennyson and Browning themselves who are talking, but imaginary persons viewed objectively, as far as Tennyson and Browning were capable of such objectivity. The next step would be the Drama, preoccupied with characters in action—the "world of men," in short, and not the personal subjective world of the highly sensitized lyric poet.

Let us now move away from that pure lyric centre in another direction. In a traditional ballad like "Sir Patrick Spens," a modern ballad like Tennyson's "The Revenge," or Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner," is not the poet's vision becoming objectified, directed upon events or things outside of the circle of his own subjective emotion? In modern epic verse, like Tennyson's "Morte d'Arthur," Arnold's "Sohrab and Rustum," Morris's "Sigurd the Volsung," and certainly in the "Aeneid" and the "Song of Roland," the poet sinks his own personality, as far as possible, in the objective narration of events. And in like manner, the poet may turn from the world of action to the world of repose, and portray Nature as enfolding and subduing the human element in his picture. In Keats's "Ode to Autumn," Shelley's "Autumn," in Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper," Browning's "Where the Mayne Glideth," we find poets absorbed in the external scene or object and striving to paint it. It is true that the born lyrists betray themselves constantly, that they suffuse both the world of repose and the world of action with the coloring of their own unquiet spirits. They cannot keep themselves wholly out of the story they are telling or the picture they are painting; and it is for this reason that we speak of "lyrical" passages even in the great objective dramas, passages colored with the passionate personal feelings of the poet. For he cannot be wholly "absolute" even if he tries: he will invent favorite characters and make them the mouthpiece of his own fancies: he will devise favorite situations, and use them to reveal his moral judgment of men and women, and his general theory of human life.

2. Definitions