Lyric Poetry (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Lyric Poetry

What, then, was the character of the impulse that gave the breath and the spirit of life to song, and moulded from the beginning of things the genius inspiring lyric poetry? We need not in seeking an answer attempt any complete philo sophy of the lyric. We can leave it to the folklorist to elaborate the theories of the communal strain in folk-song, and may be satisfied as lovers of verse to accept provisionally the Old idea of a savage confronting fate and the elements, with his squaw and her babe by her side. He, we perceive, must soon have taken to uttering ejaculatory syllables long before he had learnt to use his words with any syntax, or anything but a rude assonance and a rhythm dictated by the sustaining power and the suspiration of a single breath. When the wild man had named the first things - earth, fire, water; man and woman sun and moon quick and dead: we know that he must have also felt the need of expressing his joy and terror and other direct emotions. We cannot think of him at a stage where the mother's love for the child or the youth's for the maid, the brave's challenge or the squaw's lament, did not prompt an outcry, however rude and artless. In that cry which at the first iteration tended, according to a well known law, to become modulated, we have the essential atom out of which has grown all the intricate melody of words which we agree to call lyrical.

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