On Lyric Poetry

“In this condition there may be discoverable under new forms certain spiritual illuminations, shining with a morality essentialized from experience directly, and not from previous precepts or preoccupations. It is as though a poem gave the reader as he left it a single, new word, never before spoken and impossible to actually enunciate, but self-evident as an active principle in the reader’s consciousness henceforward.” -- Hart Crane

“The special importance of lyric poetry among our various literary genres follows directly from this argument. Lyric poetry derives its revelatory power from the primitive unities of thought and feeling which lie at the very basis of language itself. The lyric genre has been identified by Northrop Frye with 'what we think of as typically the poetic creation, which is an associative rhetorical process, most of it below the threshold of consciousness, a chaos of paranomasia, sound-links, ambiguous sense-links, and momory-links very like that of the dream. Out of this the distinctively lyrical union of sound and sense emerges.' Frye proposes that '[t]he lyric is… the genre which most clearly shows the hypothetical core of literature…' Of this same pre-conscious verbal creativity, Susanne Langer has remarked that '[t]his power of words is really astounding. Their very sound can influence one’s feeling about what they are known to mean… The vocal stresses that rhythmicize some languages, the length of vowels in others, or the tonal pitch at which words are spoken in Chinese and some less known tongues, may make one way of wording a proposition seem gayer and sadder than another. This rhythm of language is a mysterious trait that probably bespeaks biological unities of thought and feeling which are entirely unexplored as yet… The fullest exploitation of language sound and rhythm, assonance and sensuous associations, is made in lyric poetry.' To the extent that it is a discernment or disclosure of the most essential forms and rhythms of human life at the conceptual level of our awareness (the lyric genre is not so much subjective – an “I” talking to itself – as the core, or germ, of all our literary devices), lyric poetry might be thought of as the most essential of our linguistic modes of apprehension of reality.” -- Colin Falck, from his Myth, Truth, and Literature: Towards a True Post-Modernism