ABSTRACT
We have seen how the theory and practice of lyric has not followed a continuous pattern of development, but it is possible to trace a basic timeline for lyric from classical antiquity to the present. The term ‘lyric’ emerges from Ancient Greece, where it was theorised in Aristotle’s Poetics (via an earlier Pindaric model of lyric), then translated to Rome, through the poetry of Horace and Catullus in particular. The subsequent development of lyric in Europe assumed both religious and secular forms, where ‘high’ or rarefied and popular or vernacular lyric forms often interacted. The ‘literary’ lyric emerges in the music and poetry of the troubadours, and in the conventions of amour courtois (courtly love) that moved from Italy and France to Britain in the early sixteenth century, and produced a rich diversity of lyric and related forms. The perceived decline of the lyric in the eighteenth century merely preceded its apotheosis in the Romantic period, which has shaped modern critical assumptions about the lyric mode. In this major historical and philosophical moment, there is a profound conceptual shift in the understanding of the lyric. As we shall see, the dominant, post-Romantic understanding of lyric, with its stress on interiority, feeling and solitude, minimises or effaces
those elements of performance, ceremonial or ritual associated with lyric prior to Romanticism, even if its modes of address, such as apostrophe, remain central to Romantic poetics. This chapter examines the interplay and tensions between dialogue and introspection, emotional sincerity and rhetorical display, and exposure and disguise that feature consistently in the theory and practice of lyric from its classical origins to the present.
