In the early years of the twentieth century rhymed lyric poetry

Lyric poetry

Lyric poetry is a genre of poetry that expresses personal and emotional feelings. In the ancient world, lyric poems were those which were sung to the lyre. Lyric poems do not have to rhyme, and today do not need to be set to music or a beat...

, usually expressing the feelings of the poet, was the dominant poetic form in America, Europe and the British colonies

British Empire

The British Empire comprised the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom. It originated with the overseas colonies and trading posts established by England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. At its height, it was the...

. The relevance and acceptability of the lyric in the modern age was, though, called into question by modernism

Modernism

Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...

, the growing mechanization of human experience and the harsh realities of war. After the Second World War the form was again championed by the New Criticism

New Criticism

New Criticism was a movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic...

, and in the late twentieth century lyric once again became a mainstream poetic form.

Modernism

The dominance of lyric was challenged by American experimental modernists such as Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

, T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...

, H.D.

H.D.

H.D. was an American poet, novelist and memoirist known for her association with the early 20th century avant-garde Imagist group of poets such as Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington...

 and William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...

, who rejected the English lyric form of the nineteenth century, feeling that it relied too heavily on melodious language, rather than complexity of thought. Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as a lawyer for the Hartford insurance company in Connecticut.His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar",...

 and Hart Crane

Hart Crane

-Career:Throughout the early 1920s, small but well-respected literary magazines published some of Crane’s lyrics, gaining him, among the avant-garde, a respect that White Buildings , his first volume, ratified and strengthened...

, however, were modernists who also worked within the tradition of post-Romantic lyric poetry. Defenders of lyric poetry in the early twentieth century saw it as an ally in the fight against mechanization, standardization and the commodification of human activities. The poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire

Guillaume Apollinaire

Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki, known as Guillaume Apollinaire was a French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and art critic born in Italy to a Polish mother....

 represents an alternative view, that mechanization could extend the repertoire of lyric poetry.

The First World War

The tension between the traditional subjects of lyric poetry and the horrors of war are expressed in the War Poetry of Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen MC was an English poet and soldier, one of the leading poets of the First World War...

, Siegfried Sassoon

Siegfried Sassoon

Siegfried Loraine Sassoon CBE MC was an English poet, author and soldier. Decorated for bravery on the Western Front, he became one of the leading poets of the First World War. His poetry both described the horrors of the trenches, and satirised the patriotic pretensions of those who, in Sassoon's...

 and Ivor Gurney

Ivor Gurney

Ivor Bertie Gurney was an English composer and poet.-Life:Born at 3 Queen Street, Gloucester in 1890, the second of four children of David Gurney, a tailor, and his wife Florence, a seamstress, Gurney showed musical ability early...

. Owen's poem Strange Meeting

Strange Meeting (poem)

Strange Meeting is a poem by Wilfred Owen. It deals with the atrocities of World War I. The poem was written sometime in 1918 and it was published in 1919 after Owen's death...

 has been described as "a dream of a conversation with a dead lyric poet, or possibly even dead lyric itself." The Irish poet William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms...

's work up to 1917 is predominantly dramatic and lyric love poetry, but after the First World War he explores the political subjects of Irish independence, nationalism and civil war.

New Criticism

The American New Criticism

New Criticism

New Criticism was a movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic...

 returned to the lyric in the 1950s, advocating a poetry that made conventional use of rhyme, meter and stanzas, and was modestly personal in the lyric tradition. Lyric poets consistent with the New Criticism ethos include Robert Frost

Robert Frost

Robert Lee Frost was an American poet. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and...

 and Robert Lowell

Robert Lowell

Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV was an American poet, considered the founder of the confessional poetry movement. He was appointed the sixth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress where he served from 1947 until 1948...

. In the 1950s long personal epics, such as Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg

Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...

's Howl

Howl

"Howl" is a poem written by Allen Ginsberg in 1955 and published as part of his 1956 collection of poetry titled Howl and Other Poems. The poem is considered to be one of the great works of the Beat Generation, along with Jack Kerouac's On the Road and William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch...

 were a reaction against the well-wrought short lyric of the New Criticism.

Confessional poetry

Lyric poetry dealing with relationships, sex and domestic life constituted the new mainstream of American poetry in the late twentieth century, influenced by the confessional poets of the 1950s and 60s, such as Frank O'Hara

Frank O'Hara

Francis Russell "Frank" O'Hara was an American writer, poet and art critic. He was a member of the New York School of poetry.-Life:...

, John Berryman

John Berryman

John Allyn Berryman was an American poet and scholar, born in McAlester, Oklahoma. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and was considered a key figure in the Confessional school of poetry...

, Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. Born in Massachusetts, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College, Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a professional poet and writer...

 and Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton was an American poet, known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967...

. In India, confessional poetry was introduced by the members of the Bengali Hungry generation

Hungry generation

The Hungry Generation was a literary movement in the Bengali language launched by what is known today as the Hungryalist quartet i.e. Shakti Chattopadhyay, Malay Roy Choudhury, Samir Roychoudhury and Debi Roy alias Haradhon Dhara, during the 1960s in Kolkata, India...

 poets, especially by Malay Roy Choudhury

Malay Roy Choudhury

Malay Roy Choudhury is a Bengali poet and novelist who founded the "Hungryalist Movement" in the 1960s. His literary works have been reviewed by sixty critics in HAOWA 49, a quarterly magazine which devoted its January 2001 special issue to Roy Choudhury's life and works...

.

Other Notable 20th Century Lyric poets

UK

• Dylan Thomas
  Dylan Thomas
  Dylan Marlais Thomas was a Welsh poet and writer, Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 11 January 2008. who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself...
  
  
• J.R.R. Tolkien
• Robert Graves
  Robert Graves
  Robert von Ranke Graves 24 July 1895 – 7 December 1985 was an English poet, translator and novelist. During his long life he produced more than 140 works...
  
  
• Geoffrey Hill
  Geoffrey Hill
  Geoffrey Hill is an English poet, professor emeritus of English literature and religion, and former co-director of the Editorial Institute, at Boston University. Hill has been considered to be among the most distinguished poets of his generation...
  
  
• Ted Hughes
  Ted Hughes
  Edward James Hughes OM , more commonly known as Ted Hughes, was an English poet and children's writer. Critics routinely rank him as one of the best poets of his generation. Hughes was British Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death.Hughes was married to American poet Sylvia Plath, from 1956 until...
  
  

Canada

• P.K. Page
• George Bowering
  George Bowering
  George Harry Bowering, OC, OBC is a prolific Canadian novelist, poet, historian, and biographer. He has served as Canada's Parliamentary Poet Laureate....
  
  

France

• Paul Éluard
  Paul Éluard
  Paul Éluard, born Eugène Émile Paul Grindel , was a French poet who was one of the founders of the surrealist movement.-Biography:...
  
  
• Max Jacob
  Max Jacob
  Max Jacob was a French poet, painter, writer, and critic.-Life and career:After spending his childhood in Quimper, Brittany, France, he enrolled in the Paris Colonial School, which he left in 1897 for an artistic career...
  
  
• Paul Valéry
  Paul Valéry
  Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. His interests were sufficiently broad that he can be classified as a polymath...
  
  
• Blaise Cendrars
  Blaise Cendrars
  Frédéric Louis Sauser , better known as Blaise Cendrars, was a Swiss novelist and poet naturalized French in 1916. He was a writer of considerable influence in the modernist movement.-Early years:...
  
  

Germany

• Gottfried Benn
  Gottfried Benn
  Gottfried Benn was a German essayist, novelist, and expressionist poet. A doctor of medicine, he became an early admirer, and later a critic, of the National Socialist revolution...
  
  
• Paul Celan
  Paul Celan
  Paul Celan was a poet and translator...
  
  
• Stefan George
  Stefan George
  Stefan Anton George was a German poet, editor, and translator.-Biography:George was born in Bingen in Germany in 1868. He spent time in Paris, where he was among the writers and artists who attended the Tuesday soireés held by the poet Stéphane Mallarmé. He began to publish poetry in the 1890s,...
  
  
• Rainer Maria Rilke
  Rainer Maria Rilke
  René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke , better known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was a Bohemian–Austrian poet. He is considered one of the most significant poets in the German language...
  
  

Israel / Palestine

• Yehuda Amichai
  Yehuda Amichai
  Yehuda Amichai was an Israeli poet. Amichai is considered by many, both in Israel and internationally, as Israel's greatest modern poet. He was also one of the first to write in colloquial Hebrew....
  
  
• Leah Goldberg
  Leah Goldberg
  Leah Goldberg was a prolific Hebrew poet, author, playwright, literary translator, and comparative literary researcher. Her writings are considered classics of Israeli literature and remain very popular among Hebrew speaking Israelis.-Biography:...
  
  

Italy

• Eugenio Montale
  Eugenio Montale
  Eugenio Montale was an Italian poet, prose writer, editor and translator, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975.- Early years :...
  
  
• Giuseppe Ungaretti
  Giuseppe Ungaretti
  Giuseppe Ungaretti was an Italian modernist poet, journalist, essayist, critic and academic. A leading representative of the experimental trend known as Ermetismo , he was one of the most prominent contributors to 20th century Italian literature. Influenced by symbolism, he was briefly aligned...
  
  

Poland

• Czesław Miłosz
• Zbigniew Herbert
  Zbigniew Herbert
  Zbigniew Herbert was an influential Polish poet, essayist, drama writer, author of plays, and moralist. A member of the Polish resistance movement – Home Army during World War II, he is one of the best known and the most translated post-war Polish writers...
  
  
• Wisława Szymborska

Portugal

• Fernando Pessoa
  Fernando Pessoa
  Fernando Pessoa, born Fernando António Nogueira de Seabra Pessoa , was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic and translator described as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language.-Early years in Durban:On 13 July...
  
  

Brasil

• Mário Quintana
  Mario Quintana
  Mario de Miranda Quintana , was a Brazilian writer and translator. He became known as the poet of "simple things", and his style is marked by irony, profundity and technical perfection. The main themes of his poetry include death, the lost childhood and time...
  
  

Russia

• Alexander Blok
  Alexander Blok
  Alexander Alexandrovich Blok was a Russian lyrical poet.-Life and career:Blok was born in Saint Petersburg, into a sophisticated and intellectual family. Some of his relatives were literary men, his father being a law professor in Warsaw, and his maternal grandfather the rector of Saint Petersburg...
  
  
• Anna Akhmatova
  Anna Akhmatova
  Anna Andreyevna Gorenko , better known by the pen name Anna Akhmatova , was a Russian and Soviet modernist poet, one of the most acclaimed writers in the Russian canon.Harrington p11...
  
  
• Marina Tsvetaeva
  Marina Tsvetaeva
  Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva was a Russian and Soviet poet. Her work is considered among some of the greatest in twentieth century Russian literature. She lived through and wrote of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow famine that followed it. In an attempt to save her daughter Irina from...
  
  
• Osip Mandelstam
  Osip Mandelstam
  Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam was a Russian poet and essayist who lived in Russia during and after its revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union. He was one of the foremost members of the Acmeist school of poets...
  
  
• Vladimir Mayakovsky
  Vladimir Mayakovsky
  Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky was a Russian and Soviet poet and playwright, among the foremost representatives of early-20th century Russian Futurism.- Early life :...
  
  
• Sergei Yesenin
  Sergei Yesenin
  Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin was a Russian lyrical poet. He was one of the most popular and well-known Russian poets of the 20th century but committed suicide at the age of 30...
  
  

Nicaragua

• Rubén Darío
  Rubén Darío
  Félix Rubén García Sarmiento , known as Rubén Darío, was a Nicaraguan poet who initiated the Spanish-American literary movement known as modernismo that flourished at the end of the 19th century...
  
  

Spain

• Federico García Lorca
  Federico García Lorca
  Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca was a Spanish poet, dramatist and theatre director. García Lorca achieved international recognition as an emblematic member of the Generation of '27. He is believed to be one of thousands who were summarily shot by anti-communist death squads...
  
  
• Antonio Machado
  Antonio Machado
  Antonio Cipriano José María y Francisco de Santa Ana Machado y Ruiz, known as Antonio Machado was a Spanish poet and one of the leading figures of the Spanish literary movement known as the Generation of '98....
  
  

Chile

• Gabriela Mistral
  Gabriela Mistral
  Gabriela Mistral was the pseudonym of Lucila de María del Perpetuo Socorro Godoy Alcayaga, a Chilean poet, educator, diplomat, and feminist who was the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1945...
  
  
• Pablo Neruda
  Pablo Neruda
  Pablo Neruda was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean poet, diplomat and politician Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. He chose his pen name after Czech poet Jan Neruda....
  
  

Mexico

• Octavio Paz
  Octavio Paz
  Octavio Paz Lozano was a Mexican writer, poet, and diplomat, and the winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature.-Early life and writings:...
  
  

Turkey

• Nazim Hikmet
  Nazim Hikmet
  Nâzım Hikmet Ran , commonly known as Nâzım Hikmet , was a Turkish poet, playwright, novelist and memoirist. He was acclaimed for the "lyrical flow of his statements"...
  
  

Bengali

• Jibanananda Das
  Jibanananda Das
  Jibanananda Das was a noted Bengali poet. He is considered one of the precursors who introduced modernist poetry to Bengali Literature, at a period when it was influenced by Rabindranath Tagore's Romantic poetry....
  
  
• Shakti Chattopadhyay
  Shakti Chattopadhyay
  Shakti Chattopadhay was a Bengali poet and writer, widely regarded as one of the greatest poet of 20th century Bengali literature. -External links:...