English Lyric Poetry, 1500-1700

`HE English Lyric has been late in coming into its own. For a full century the exquisite song of the lesser Elizabethan choir lay perdue History of the while the great critics of the classical appreciation of period, following in the way of the later Lyric. Aristotelian tradition, solemnly discussed theory and practice in epic and drama only. Dryden, ever a jealous defender of English literary performance, has next to nothing to say of the English Lyric. The eighteenth-century imitators of Milton and Spenser catch not so much at the lyric vein of these masters as at their tricks of diction and at their narrative or their idyllic manner. Percy's Reliques, in 1765, however, began to bring back into esteem the wilding flavour of sixteenthand seventeenth-century verse, both art-lyric and popular song and ballad. And perhaps the obscurer collections of verse which earlier in the century preceded the Reliques, such as Allan Ramsay's Evergreen, also helped to insinuate something of the spirit of the older lyric, and something of its peculiar cadence and rhythm of song, into the minds of impressionable youths like Burns and Blake and Chatterton, and to prepare the taste of the new generation little by little for the new things which

were coming in poetry. The Romantic revolution was certainly in part a literary revolution, involving a return to higher sources of inspiration and to older poetic ideals than had prevailed for so long. Wordsworth, writing in 1815, testifies as to the effect wrought by Percy's Reliques, that "For our own country its poetry has been absolutely redeemed by it". The lyrical spirit of modern English poetry is in considerable measure a development from the lyrical spirit of the Elizabethan age; and the appreciation of the Elizabethan lyric has grown with the growth of the modern lyric.

The term 'Lyric' in modern times has always been of uncertain usage. In the broadest sense it is often taken to cover all poetry which What is Lyric? does not fall under the species Epic or Drama, or any of their allied forms. Vagueness of connotation has attached to the term, also, from the implicit acceptance by some modern writers of the lyric form and mood as the poetic form and mood par excellence. In this sense lyrical expression is conceived as the very soul and essence of poetical expression. Thus Gray in a letter to Mason, December 19th, 1756, writes: "The true lyric style, with all its flights of fancy, ornaments, and heightening of expression, and harmony of sound, is in its nature superior to every other style; which is just the cause why it could not be borne in a work of great length, no more than the eye could bear to see all this scene that we constantly gaze uponthe verdure of the fields and woods, the azure of the sea and skies-turned into one dazzling expanse of gems". The same idea has been elaborated

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