Lyric Poetry from the Perspective of Universality of Narration

Abstract

Lyric poetry is often understood as a collective concept for non-narrative poetry or poetry without a story, although Hegel already drew attention to the presence of narrative elements in the most subjective literary genre. In his Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel defined the subject of lyric poetry as the internal world of sentiments, but it could also be an event that, through its content and external characteristics, is epic (e.g., in heroic poems, romances, and ballads) or occasional (as in poems for special events). In both cases¸ it is essential that the basic tone remains lyric; this means that no objective description of an actual event is foregrounded, but the subject’s reflection and his feelings or mood. – In the twentieth century, theorists no longer treated lyric poetry so much as an expression of the poet’s feelings but as a dramatization of the speaker’s spoken thoughts and feelings, and as the literary genre that most strongly expressed linguistic creation. As part of transgeneric narratology, a new approach developed that applied concepts used for analyzing narrative texts to lyric poetry. This article deals with the thesis that narration is a universal semiotic practice that is also characteristic of lyric poetry. Whereas Hegel believed that external events were the subject of lyric poetry in only a few cases (whether epic or occasional), which can be said to belong to the “level of happenings” (i.e., the world of the story), and whereas lyric poetry is often defined as poetry without events at this level, in the typology of the Hamburg researchers (Peter Hühn et al.) events are placed at two additional levels: the level of presentation (discourse) and the level of reading. The reader constructs a story from the events at these three levels, and this process can be explained through the concept of narrativization (Monika Fludernik). The author of this article draws attention to the usefulness of the theory of schemas, frames, and scripts for studying lyric poetry, presents Patrick Colm Hogan’s narrative hypothesis, according to which lyric poems are placed in prototypical narratives, and extends the thesis on the universality of narration to modern lyric poetry. The conclusion suggests that interpretations in which attention is directed to narrativization of poems should also take into account characteristics of style.