7 - Lyric and the lyrical

Summary

… the forms are often confused.

‘The Editor is acquainted with no strict and exhaustive definition of Lyrical Poetry’, wrote Francis Palgrave in the preface to the first of his immensely popular anthologies, The Golden Treasury: Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language (1861). A crucial arbiter of poetic tastes in the nineteenth century, The Golden Treasury would go on to sell about ten thousand copies a year until the Second World War. In 1860, Palgrave had written to Tennyson to ask advice about methods of selection: ‘I hesitate whether Elegies such as Gray’s, and Sonnets should properly be included. They are lyrical in structure, and sonnets have always ranked as lyrical; but their didactic tone appears to me not decisively lyrical.’ The problem of what is, and is not, lyrical would never be easily settled. At this time Palgrave decided to exclude both didactic poetry and ‘all pieces markedly dramatic’. However, by the time he came to the 1897 edition, he was forced to acknowledge not only ‘a vast extension in length of our lyrics’ but also their frequently ‘dramatic character’. The ‘dramatic’, which in 1861 seemed antipathetic to lyric, could no longer be categorically excluded. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the term ‘lyric’ has eluded decisive definition, its relation to the ‘dramatic’ being one of the word’s most difficult faultlines. As a term, it is both frustratingly unspecific yet powerfully enduring.