Lyric and Poetics

The lyric — the short, intense, first-person poem — is at once the most familiar poetic kind and the hardest to define. Comparative poetics studies how lyric works across languages and how the very category of 'lyric' was historically constructed.

Definition

The comparative study of lyric poetry and of poetics — the analysis of poetic language, form, and the lyric mode — across languages and historical periods.

Scope

Treats the lyric genre and the broader poetics that analyzes poetic language comparatively: theories of what the lyric is and does, the linguistic study of the poetic function, and the recent 'historical poetics' critique that questions whether lyric is a transhistorical kind or a modern reading construct. Concerns poetic form, address, and voice across traditions.

Core questions

• What is the lyric, and is it a stable transhistorical genre?
• What distinguishes poetic language from ordinary language?
• How does lyric address — its apparent speech to an absent or non-human listener — work?
• Is 'lyric' a real kind across literatures or a category imposed by modern reading practices?

Key theories

Theory of the lyric

Culler argued for a broad transhistorical model of the lyric centered on ritualistic address, apostrophe, and the lyric 'present', against narrowly dramatic models that read every poem as a fictional speaker's utterance.

The poetic function

Jakobson defined the poetic function as the projection of the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection onto the axis of combination, giving a linguistic account of what makes language poetic.

Historical poetics and lyricization

The lyric-theory debate gathered by Jackson and Prins argues that the modern idea of 'the lyric' resulted from a historical process of lyricization that read diverse poems as expressive utterances.

History

Poetics descends from Aristotle and classical metrics, but the modern comparative theory of the lyric is recent. Jakobson's 1960 'Linguistics and Poetics' supplied a structural account of the poetic function; the New Lyric Studies and historical-poetics movement, anthologized by Jackson and Prins in 2014, challenged the lyric as a transhistorical kind; and Culler's 2015 Theory of the Lyric mounted a wide comparative defense of the genre.

Debates

Transhistorical lyric versus lyricization

Whether the lyric is a genuine cross-cultural genre (Culler) or a category retroactively projected onto diverse poems by modern reading habits (historical poetics).

Key figures

• Jonathan Culler
• Roman Jakobson
• Virginia Jackson
• Yopie Prins

Seminal works

• jakobson1960
• culler2015
• jacksonprins2014

Frequently asked questions

Why do scholars debate whether 'the lyric' really exists?

Historical-poetics critics argue that the unified idea of 'the lyric' as a short expressive poem is a relatively modern construction; many older poems now read as lyrics were not originally grouped that way. Culler counters that recurring features such as apostrophe and address support a transhistorical genre.