Home › Glossary › Letter M

Multivoiced lyric

Form
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A lyric poem that presents more than one voice, speaker, or point of view, often in dialogue or juxtaposition; it creates polyphony, dramatic tension, and the interplay of multiple subjectivities.

Detailed Definition
A Multivoiced lyric integrates multiple perspectives, registers, or personas within a single poem, creating a polyphonic texture that resists singular interpretation; it may juxtapose dialects, historical voices, or conflicting emotions to explore identity, memory, or social complexity, as in the work of M. NourbeSe Philip or Claudia Rankine.
Example
Example in poetry:
In T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” multiple voices—prophetic, mythic, colloquial—create a multivoiced lyric; In Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Anniad,” classical, jazz, and personal voices merge into multivoiced lyric; In Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen,” reported speech, internal thought, and media fragments form a multivoiced lyric; In Anne Carson’s “The Beauty of the Husband,” testimonial, myth, and analysis intertwine as multivoiced lyric.
Additional Notes
A Multivoiced lyric integrates distinct perspectives or registers (e.g., personal, historical, mythical) without unifying them into one voice; reflects postmodern fragmentation; requires clear typographic or syntactic cues to distinguish voices.
Also Known As
Polyphonic lyric multi-voiced poem choral lyric heteroglot verse multiple identity verse Polyphonic utterance
Skip to main content