Genres & Forms
Lyric (literary kind)
The lyric is a literary kind that renders reality through the direct expression of a person's feelings, experiences, and reflections; at its center stands not an event but the inner state of the lyric subject. The name comes from the Greek lyre, the instrument to whose accompaniment such works were performed in antiquity. The lyric tends toward brevity, emotional concentration, and the rhythmic and sonic organization of language; its leading genres are the ode, elegy, sonnet, epistle, hymn, epigram, and romance. Its key concept is the lyric hero, the conventional bearer of the experience. In Ukrainian literature the heights of the lyric are the intimate and philosophical poetry of Lesia Ukrainka, Taras Shevchenko (It Makes No Difference to Me), Lina Kostenko, and Vasyl Stus; in world literature — Sappho, Petrarch, Goethe, and Rainer Maria Rilke.
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Distinction
Two literary kinds, separated by the form of the text's existence. Drama is meant for STAGE embodiment: it reveals conflict through the action and dialogue of characters, without direct authorial speech, and lives in performance, in the present tense of events before an audience. The lyric is the monologue of an inner 'I', centred not on action but on feeling and mood, and lives in the sounding of the poetic word. Drama shows the clash of wills from without; the lyric reveals the soul's state from within.
