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Sarah LuriaAssociate Professor, Department of English |
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Lyric Poem
Lowell's poem "For the Union Dead" (1960) is a lyric poem. The lyric is a major "genre" (kind of poem) within poetry. Its chief characteristics are that it is short and expresses the poet's thoughts or feelings. Scholar/critic Helen Vendler defines the lyric as follows: Lyric is the genre of private life: it is what we say to ourselves when we are alone. There may be an adressee in lyric (God, or a beloved), but the addresee is always absent....In a way, imagination is at its most unfettered in lyric because the writer need not give a recognizable portrait of society, as the novelist or dramatist must. Because the lyric represents a moment of inner meditation, it is relatively short, and always exists in a particular place--'here'--and a particular time--'now.' It may speak about the there and then, but it speaks about them from the here and now. It lets us into the innermost chamber of another person's mind, and makes us privy to what he or she would say in complete secrecy and safety, with none to overhear. (x)Lyric poems can both narrate a story and mediate upon that story. Lowell's poem is a meditation that involves several short narratives. Vendler notes that lyric poems are "generally classified in three ways: by content, by speech act, and by outer form" (105). The content of Lowell's poem could be classified as an "elegy" (a poem mourning a death) as well as an "autobiography." As a "speech act," it could be classified as a "meditation." And in terms of its outer-form, it is a poem in unrhymed quatrains (stanzas of four lines each). Each of these classifications offer a different way into our investigation of the poem.
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