Lyric poetry
[a][2] The term owes its importance in literary theory to the division developed by Aristotle among three broad categories of poetry: lyrical, dramatic, and epic.
For the ancient Greeks, lyric poetry had a precise technical meaning: Verse that was accompanied by a lyre, cithara, or barbitos.
[6] Among the major surviving Roman poets of the classical period, only Catullus (Carmina 11, 17, 30, 34, 51, 61) and Horace (Odes) wrote lyric poetry,[citation needed] which was instead read or recited.
Notable authors include Hafiz, Amir Khusro, Auhadi of Maragheh, Alisher Navoi, Obeid e zakani, Khaqani Shirvani, Anvari, Farid al-Din Attar, Omar Khayyam, and Rudaki.
The ghazal was introduced to European poetry in the early 19th century by the Germans Schlegel, Von Hammer-Purgstall, and Goethe, who called Hafiz his "twin".
In Italy, Petrarch developed the sonnet form pioneered by Giacomo da Lentini and Dante's Vita Nuova.
In 1327, according to the poet, the sight of a woman called Laura in the church of Sainte-Claire d'Avignon awoke in him a lasting passion, celebrated in the Rime sparse ("Scattered rhymes").
[14] In 16th-century Britain, Thomas Campion wrote lute songs and Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare popularized the sonnet.
In France, La Pléiade, a group including Pierre de Ronsard, Joachim du Bellay, and Jean-Antoine de Baïf, aimed to break with earlier traditions of French poetry, particularly Marot and the grands rhétoriqueurs, and began imitating classical Greek and Roman forms such as the ode.
Although better known for his epic Os Lusíadas, Luís de Camões is also considered the greatest Portuguese lyric poet of the period.
A German lyric poet of the period is Martin Opitz; in Japan, this was the era of the noted haiku-writer Matsuo Bashō.
[18] Other important Romantic lyric writers of the period include Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron.
[21] According to Georg Lukács, the verse of Joseph von Eichendorff exemplified the German Romantic revival of the folk-song tradition initiated by Goethe, Herder, and Arnim and Brentano's Des Knaben Wunderhorn.
[23]: 15 For Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire was the last example of lyric poetry "successful on a mass scale" in Europe.
[25] The Swedish "Phosphorists" were influenced by the Romantic movement and their chief poet Per Daniel Amadeus Atterbom produced many lyric poems.
[26] Italian lyric poets of the period include Ugo Foscolo, Giacomo Leopardi, Giovanni Pascoli, and Gabriele D'Annunzio.
In the earlier years of the 20th century rhymed lyric poetry, usually expressing the feelings of the poet, was the dominant poetic form in the United States,[27] Europe, and the British colonies.
The English Georgian poets and their contemporaries such as A. E. Housman, Walter de la Mare, and Edmund Blunden used the lyric form.
