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 of the three literary kinds, opposite in their mode of grasping the world. The epic is OBJECTIVE: it narrates events that have occurred, depicts the outer world, characters and deeds in their unfolding, with the author largely a detached narrator. The lyric is SUBJECTIVE: it conveys the immediate inner state, feeling and experience of the lyric 'I' in the present moment, event yielding to emotion. The epic recounts the world; the lyric utters the soul.
