Home › Glossary › Letter P

Poésie lyrique

French
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

Poetry expressing the personal feelings, emotions, and inner life of the poet, characterized by its musical quality and subjectivity. The dominant mode of Western poetry from the Renaissance onward.

Detailed Definition
Poésie lyrique is the broadest and most fundamental category of Western poetry, designating all verse whose primary aim is the expression of subjective emotion, inner experience, and personal feeling. Inherited from the ancient Greek lyre-accompanied song, it encompasses love poetry, elegy, ode, and meditation. From Ronsard to Baudelaire and Apollinaire, the French lyric tradition is extraordinarily rich. The lyric poet speaks in the first person, transforming personal experience into universally resonant expression. The lyric mode dominates the modern understanding of what poetry essentially is and does.
Example
Example in poetry:
Lamartine's "Le Lac" stands as the defining example of French Romantic poésie lyrique: the meditation addressed to the lake where his dying beloved cannot return fuses landscape, memory, and grief in a poem of extraordinary emotional directness and formal beauty; Ronsard's Amours sequences demonstrate Renaissance poésie lyrique's Petrarchan inheritance: the 225 sonnets to Cassandre organize personal desire into a formal architecture that transforms individual experience into a monument of poetic mastery; Verlaine's "Romances sans paroles" represents Symbolist poésie lyrique in its purest form: personal feeling dissolved into musical suggestion, the lyric self dispersed into impressions of color, sound, and atmosphere that hover between confession and pure sonic pattern; A student writing poésie lyrique should begin with a specific memory or emotion and develop it through image rather than statement, discovering how the lyric poem creates universality not by avoiding the personal but by making the personal so precisely realized that it resonates beyond individual experience; The distinction between poésie lyrique and the lyric as a category encompasses vast formal diversity: from the medieval chanson to the contemporary prose poem, from the strict Petrarchan sonnet to the loosest free verse, lyric poetry's only constant is the primacy of the speaking subject's inner life as the poem's organizing center; Apollinaire's "La Chanson du Mal-Aimé" demonstrates how the great lyric poem can accommodate formal experimentation, multiple registers from tragic to comic, and extended narrative development while remaining fundamentally and powerfully lyric in its emotional directness.
Additional Notes
Poésie lyrique foregrounds emotional expression, musicality, and subjective experience, though the exact nature of lyric subjectivity changes across historical periods. Students should avoid reducing lyric poetry to autobiographical confession, since poetic voice is often carefully constructed. Compare with broader concepts of lyrisme. The category remains central because it helps distinguish poetry organised around emotional articulation from primarily narrative, didactic, or dramatic forms, even where genres overlap.
Also Known As
Lyric poetry Lyrical verse
Skip to main content