Lyric, something that was sung or played on the lyre, the kithara or the harp of the ancients.

Lyric is used particularly for the antique modes or stances that correspond to our airs or songs. That is why odes were called lyric poetry , because they were sung, the lyre accompanied the voice. See Ode.

The ancients were great admirers of lyric verse, and they gave this name, according to M. Barnés, to all verses that could one could sing with the lyre. See Verse.

At first, lyric poetry was used to celebrate and praise the gods and heroes. Musa dedit fidibus divos puerosque deorum , says Horace, but then it was introduced to sing of the pleasures of the table, and those of love: and juvenum curas & libra vina referte , says the same author.

It would be an error to believe along with the Greeks that Anacreon was the first author [of lyric verse], since it appears in writing more than a thousand years before this poet; the Hebrews sang canticles to the sound of harps, cymbals and other instruments. Some authors have wished to exclude heroic subjects from lyric poetry. M. Barnés has demonstrated against them that the lyric genre is susceptible to all the elevation and sublimity that these subjects require. This is confirmed by examples from Alcyon, Stesichoron and Horace, and finally an essay in his style that he placed at the opening of his work under the title Ode triomphale [ Triumphal Ode ] for the duke of Marlborough. He finishes with the history of lyric poetry, and with that of the ancient authors who excelled in it.

The character of lyric poetry is one of nobility and sweetness: nobility for heroic subjects, sweetness for playful or gallant subjects since it embraces these two genres as one can see under the word Ode.

If majesty should dominate in heroic verses, simplicity in pastorales, tenderness in the elegy, the gracious and lively in satire, jest in the comic, moving in tragedy, concise in the epigram, in the lyric , the poet should principally apply himself to astonishing the spirit by the sublimity of things or through that of the sentiments, or to flatter by sweetness and the variety of images, by the harmony of the verses, by descriptions and other flowery figures, vivid and vehement according to the requirements of the subject. See Ode.

Lyric poetry has in all times been made to be sung, and such is that of our operas, but superior to all others is that of Quinault, who seems to have understood this genre infinitely better than those who preceded or followed him. In consequence, lyric poetry and music should have an intimate rapport between them and should be founded in the thing itself which the one or the other seeks to express. If that is so, music being an expression of sentiments of the heart through inarticulate sounds, musical poetry, or lyric poetry is the expression of sentiments through articulate sounds, or through words, which is the same thing.

M. de la Mothe gave a discourse on the ode, or lyric poetry, in which among many ingenious reflections there are few true principles on the fire or the enthusiasm that should be the soul of lyric poetry. See Enthusiasm and Ode.