Cirrus@Austlit

Lyric poetry is an affective art: it engages with emotional experience, and seeks to communicate an experience to others, through the deft use of all the technical means available to the poet. The peculiar agency of the lyric poem has been formulated in myriad ways over time by poets and philosophers alike. John Hollander cites Pseudo-Longinus on this effect: ‘by the blending of its own manifold tones it brings into the hearts of the bystanders the speaker’s actual emotion…’ (Hollander 1985: 7). The New Princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics (1993: 713) defines the lyric poem as one in which musical elements, perceptions and the intent to communicate emotion and thought are brought together indivisibly in the fabric of the poem:

[t]he musical element is intrinsic to the work intellectually as well as aesthetically: it becomes the focal point for the poet’s perceptions as they are given a verbalized form to convey emotional and rational values.

'This essay proposes that recent philosophical, neuroscientific and psychotherapeutic research into the nature and experience of resonance and attunement provides a way of understanding the specifically emotional effects of a lyric poem on a reader. The phenomena of resonance and attunement, newly understood, have also begun to clarify the interpersonal nature of the space such poetry inhabits.'  (Publication abstract)