How To Write Lyric Poetry

“This lyre-derived heritage survives robustly in the lyrics of pop songs, guitars now taking the place of the lyre and the orality of the human voice singing taking precedence over all.”

Aristotle’s Poetics divides poetry into three main categories: epic, dramatic, and lyric. While approximate, that division roughly still holds today. Beowulf is an epic. King Lear is a drama in verse. Most of the poetry of William Butler Yeats, such as “Byzantium” is lyric. Compared to the first two, lyric tends to be short. A sonnet, for example, has only fourteen lines. Beowulf has 3,182. The Iliad has 15,693. Epic and dramatic poetry is seldom written in modern times, having largely been replaced by narrative forms such as the novel, though one can cite poetic examples such as Derek Walcott’s Omeros, which, not coincidentally, is modeled on the most famous and enduring Western verse epic, Homer’s The Odyssey. Nevertheless, for the past two centuries, most poetry written in English has become lyric, to the extent that we now just call it “poetry” without thinking, and it is widely understood what is meant by that. But that does not mean lyric poetry itself is a recent phenomenon.

The origins of Western lyric poetry, like so much of our culture, lie in ancient Greece. Sappho, often called the tenth muse, was writing lyric poetry such as elegies, epigrams, odes, and love ballads, around 600 B.C.

Ornate-throned immortal Aphrodite, wile-weaving
daughter of Zeus, I entreat you: do not overpower my
heart, mistress, with ache and anguish
but come here, if ever in the past you heard my voice
from afar and acquiesced and came, leaving your
father’s golden house.

This poem consists of seven three-line stanzas. That is all she needs to accomplish what she wants.