Literary
genre including any short, personal, and passionate form of verse, usually a meditation on a single idea or theme with the goal of evoking emotion. The term does not imply a particular rhythm, rhyme scheme, or technique but an interest in limiting experience to a single, emotional peak; in this way, lyric poetry can be distinguished from
narrative verse. A lyric poem often presents a speaker who expresses his or her state of mind or thought processes.
Sonnets,
odes, and
elegies are all lyric poems. Originally, a lyric was a song sung to a lyre, and song texts are still called lyrics.
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