purpose of lyric essay

A Moment That You Couldn’t Tell: Riding the Gradient of the Lyric Essay

In his poem “Because You Asked About the Line Between Prose and Poetry,” Howard Nemerov writes:

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle That while you watched turned to pieces of snow Riding a gradient invisible From silver aslant to random, white, and slow. There came a moment that you couldn’t tell. And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

Nemerov’s short poem suggests a gradient where poetry could be described as snow, and prose as rain—a fair comparison, I think. In poetry, an individual word asks for more attention than a single word in prose, the way snow greets skin in discrete bursts of sensation, flake by flake. Snow, like poetry, is structured in a delicate lattice, rather than a cohesive body. Snow, like poetry, carries less momentum than rain or prose, offering, instead, a moment of stalled time and levitation. and not unlike the six stanzas of a villanelle (one of my favorite poetic forms), each of a snowflake’s six points orbit a center of gravity that travels less than its extremities. 

Rain, on the other hand, builds momentum and falls with satisfying weight, akin to the quick pace of prose. Raindrops combine and disappear into a larger body bound by a threshold of surface tension, like the words that form an essay. And although rain may not demand much attention drop by drop, it soaks you through, getting you wet beneath your clothes. 

This rain-to-snow metaphor suggests a gradient across the metric of cold, and the way dropping degrees can alter structure, motion, and reflectivity. Perhaps I should resist this, but I like the idea that a poem is colder than an essay—lonely, stark in its relief, a line dropping off and picking back up like a broken phone connection. A poem lets you sit in your loneliness, lets writer and reader share solitude over an impossible distance. An essay betrays you into thinking, for a while, that someone sits beside you. 

But I like lyric essays, poem-essay hybrids, pieces best categorized as sleet if essays are rain and poems snow. Nemerov hints at a kind of beauty in that liminal form, that moment between, “silver aslant” and “random, white and slow”; in my estimation, however, being in sleet is a miserable experience, encompassing the problems of both rain and snow (freezing and wet, heavy and sharp with crystals), and the delights of neither.

“Here, of course, we come to the point where my illustration […] breaks down.” —C. S. Lewis

Perhaps I’m taking this metaphor business too seriously. Likely, metaphors are best employed as flexible, atmospheric, irreducible, like an optical illusion you can only see when you don’t focus too hard. Treating metaphors to a stringent rule has the danger of taking out their charm, of limiting their boundless, contradictory span. After all, in the Bible, rain is both a reliever of drought and a destroyer by flood; snow, too, is a double entendre, evoking in one moment the purity of the Messiah’s garment, in another, the contamination of leprous skin.

So let me try again. When I said that I liked the idea of a gradient across temperatures as a metaphor for poetry and prose, I knew I was treading on thin ice, so to speak. A gradient or a sliding scale implies that the closer you get to essay, the farther you get from poetry, and vice versa. Not true, of course. Or at least, even if prose and poetry are on opposite ends of a spectrum, essay and poetry are not. On the contrary, essays invite poetic treatment, at times demand it, and vice versa. 

Poems, for example, tend to have essayistic motives, whether by suggesting the importance of a red wheelbarrow and thus finding the eternal in the transient, or by offering idiosyncratic, subversive life creeds. Many lyric essays have the potential for being labeled poetry or prose poems just as easily as being labeled essays. Gregory Pardlo describes the essays he writes as flexible in scope like poetry, affording “The same thrills of transgressing against the form—and I know there are people very close to me who are going to say, ‘That’s not an essay, that’s way too lyrical, and you’ve gone off the rails!’” As one of my creative writing students asked of “Unspoken Hunger” by Terry Tempest Williams, “Is this not a poem?”

I resonate with Lia Purpura’s suggestion that the term “lyric essay” is perhaps best employed as a conversation starter; it can act as a starting point or a gathering place, where writers and readers come for communion and conversation and challenge (Purpura, 338). 

Of course, I come to the lyric essay conversation with my own preferences and biases, so let me suggest my idea of what a lyric essay might involve. 

The lyric essay I want is like any other essay in that it thinks on the page and asserts a person (a living author, or at least an author who lived), and takes an interest (if a slanted and skeptical one) in truth and actuality. But the lyric essay I want also leans into the vast glossary of poetic terms like rhyme, alliteration, hyperbole, and repetition to create form, or what Seneca Review calls “density and shapeliness.” If the essay is the master chess player and poetry is the principal dancer, perhaps lyric essays are the dance of pieces on the board; call it chess or the essay, call it dance or poetry, because it is.  

For me, then, lyric essays―whether heavy like wet snow, or light like tiny drops of crystalizing rain―get cozy with the physicality of fine arts as well as the momentum and coverage of “the free mind at play” (Ozick). Lyric essays rely on the medium (its shape and sound and heft) as much as the message. A big part of the “lyric,” as I see it, comes down to sensory markers like musical language and the relationship between text and white space. Ira Sukrungruang says, “I loved how lyric essays looked on the page. […] A poem, before we even make sense of it, is a visual seduction.” Poems rely on white spice and stanzas and the measurement of a line, drawing the eye to a cliff here or a wall of text there. Poems also rely on sound, on lazy vowels or hard stop consonants, on the breathy hushes and plosive glottals embedded within words. Lyric essays bring the poetic body into the meandering walk of the essay.

I recognize, however, that it’s impossible to have an essay, or any text, without body and shape and structure. We read with our eyes, ears, or fingers; the text is necessarily physical. Just as a raindrop is as physical and structured as a snowflake, essays are as corporeal as poems. We write and speak with our body, dragging a pen, clacking keys with our hands, flexing our vocal chords or carving out space with the motion of our hands. Spoken or written words are abstractions and concepts, but they are also embodied; such is evident when our fingers are too stiff to travel across a keyboard, our vocal chords too inflamed to bear vibration.

I often lose my voice and feel fatigued, and my hands frequently hurt or prickle with irritation. In this state, the body of an essay or a poem can make the difference between whether or not I read or write at all. If an essay is written with lengthy paragraphs and little white space, my eyes struggle to focus and I may not be able to follow what I am reading on a given day. While writing, if I am in a revising mood and I want to read what I have written to my husband, I can get through a poem easily, whereas reading just a few paragraphs of an essay taxes my voice and can steer me out of a creative headspace altogether. 

Beyond issues of comfort, when I am feeling a little unwell, my senses are heightened. My brain may feel less sharp, but sound makes more sense than ever. Consonants become percussive strokes and closed vibrations, vowels become sighs and vibrato. A sentence becomes a meter, a paragraph a verse. When I don’t feel well, words, spoken and written, become more overwhelming, more exacting, and because of that I want fewer of them, or want to string them along in a rolling rhythm. Lyric essays let me give my mind a rest and, at the same time, let me tap into the chaos and movement of my overfiring neurons. 

Just as all essays and poems have some level of “body,” all essays and poems have some level of mind and thought and abstraction. But not all poems—or even all essays—have a committed interest in the narrative factuality that defines creative nonfiction, creating some tension about what counts as “true enough” for the lyric essay.

Roxane Gay suggests that lyric essays, in their presumptive “nonfiction” state, honor their contract with the reader by holding to real-life material even when stretching or hyperfocusing to fantastical heights. She explains, “The way we are being told these truths are masked in some sort of artifice [of] what words repeat themselves, the speed of the language varying, phrases meant to express the intangible in a tangible way.” By this measure, truth in the lyric essay sometimes becomes distorted by the fuzziness of hyperbole or hypotheticals, but ultimately extrapolates its dream-like form from real events or dynamics. 

If lyrical forms can push the boundaries of truth, however, they can also gain access to truths that might slip under the radar in a more straightforward form. For example, if hyperbole or hypotheticals can distort an image or story, other poetic elements like sensory focus and structural restraints can cut through situational distractions in a story, getting right into the heart of the matter.  

Gregory Pardlo says, 

“I’m always writing through sound, and if I’m writing through a received form it’s a kind of way of backing into an emotional danger zone, right? I always tell my students we have denial for a very good reason—to keep us sane, to keep us safe, so that we can move through our day with some measure of sanity. But my job when I sit down to write is to circumvent that wall.”

For Pardlo, structure and constraints eliminate the easiest expressions, taking away our most used coping mechanisms and requiring us to enter a territory without our well-used defenses.

Beyond modes of expression, for some, scruples about what counts and doesn’t count as “true” or “nonfiction” may not matter very much; after all, a poem carries little if any presumption of real world accuracy, and for some the gradient between poem and essay is more one of style than of content. For me, though, all essays—including lyric essays—gain meaning as real manifestations of a writer and actual stories. Like Scott Russell Sanders, “I take seriously the prefix ‘non-’ in nonfiction,” and I count myself in the company of those who “believe they are inscribing themselves in some fundamental way” (Lazar, “Introduction). 

As a simple example of the charms afforded by facts, aphorisms occupy a space between essays and poetry but often rely on a degree of basic truth telling. When Mary Capello writes, “Mood: cloud cover. / Mood: a room with no walls,” she pairs it with simple and accurate but artful observations, such as “You put on your coat in winter.  You pull on your coat in autumn. Each act of self-cloaking determined by the season’s mood.” If Capello had made such an observation without accurately reflecting linguistic patterns, at least for a given population, then the aphorism would lose its power as a social and artful revelation.

Mostly, I write in prose. I type sentences or paragraphs, rough hewn thoughts full of redundancies and repetitions, and not at all devoid of throat clearing (ahem). Some days, though, when my fingers ache, I try to write in short, spare verse instead, simply to avoid the pain. These are days when typing amplifies rather than relieves the soreness and aches I feel throughout my body, when everything hurts and my skin feels raw and itchy and trying to get a few paragraphs of an essay feels beyond my stamina.

These days, I rely on the traffic between poetry and essays in a physical capacity. So maybe I’m trying to pawn off a very practical tactic (i.e. writing fewer words) as a more artistically motivated one (i.e. writing for musicality of sound). Even more generally, though, I have almost always had a preference for shorter works. I have a strong aversion to reading long pieces at anything other than a leisurely pace, and even then, I willingly seek out only gentle, accessible texts. 

My point is, my literary ideal is so shaped by preferences and pain and limitations that I can’t think clearly about these genres. But then, the point is also that all of us are shaped by preferences, pains and predilections that are imposed on us by temperaments and conditions we didn’t choose. None of us live deep philosophical lives independent of our bodies. If anyone in this world is not a “pain” writer (or a nature writer or food writer), it is only because much of their personal experience is withheld (either carefully or subconsciously) from their writerly persona.

Put another way, I write what is physically and temperamentally easy for me to write, and am inclined to read the same. In that sense, lyric essays are, more than anything else, an accommodation—and for that alone, I am forever grateful to them.

Years ago, a departmental form asked me how I wanted to “contribute to the field of creative writing”—a question I like to think would make any writer queasy for its weight and expectation. The best answer I could think of was personal; reading and writing for a couple of hours (or minutes) a day gives me joy, and that joy helps me attend my family with more peace and eagerness and feel a little more sane in the world.  A sidestep of an answer, if you will, but it was all I felt comfortable writing down, and no one called me out on it. 

Mostly, my answer hasn’t changed. As valuable as essays are for influencing political persuasion and cultivating empathy in a divided world, my motivations for reading and writing tend to be much more impulsive and palliative than revolutionary. Often, I feel like Eduardo Galeano , who said, “I write only when I feel the need to write, not because my conscience dictates it. It doesn’t just come from my indignation at injustice; it is a celebration of life, which is so beautifully horrible and horribly beautiful.” I like lyric essays for their celebration of life, their wide range of communicative measures, their transformation of pleasure and pain—and by “lyric essays” I mean essays and poetry and everything in between.

Essays, and poems, are thrilling. After writing a section of this essay, I told my husband that I was so excited I might pee my pants (an admittedly unremarkable proposition for someone who wrote most of while pregnant or postpartum). There is a natural high that comes from moments of flow or hardwon revisions or sharing what I have written with another person. Or, on other days, when I am less prone to delight and more to gloom, reading and writing offers solace. As Mark Strand says, “Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.” I’m here for the pain-filtered-to-pleasure of writing, for the respite of lying on the couch with a blanket at my feet, the sound of tapping keys like rain against my window.

Works Cited

Capello, Mary. “Mood Modulations.” Life Breaks In (a mood almanac) . The University of Chicago Press, 2016, 27-45.

Lazar, David. “Introduction.” Essaying the Essay , edited by David Lazar. Welcome Table Press, 2014, 1-12.

Lewis, C.S. “Making and Begetting.” Mere Christianity.  

Purpura, Lia. “What is a Lyric Essay? Some Provisional Responses.” Essaying the Essay , edited by David Lazar. Welcome Table Press, 2014, 336-340.

Sanders, Scott Russel. “Interview with Scott Russel Sanders.” Interview by Patrick Madden. River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative . Vol. 9 Iss. 1, 2007, 87-98.

Alizabeth Worley lives near Utah Lake with her husband, Michael, and their two kids. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Post Road Magazine , Guernica , Tar River Poetry , and elsewhere. You can find her writing and artwork at alizabeth.worley.com .

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An Introduction to the Lyric Essay

Rebecca Hussey

Rebecca holds a PhD in English and is a professor at Norwalk Community College in Connecticut. She teaches courses in composition, literature, and the arts. When she’s not reading or grading papers, she’s hanging out with her husband and son and/or riding her bike and/or buying books. She can't get enough of reading and writing about books, so she writes the bookish newsletter "Reading Indie," focusing on small press books and translations. Newsletter: Reading Indie Twitter: @ofbooksandbikes

View All posts by Rebecca Hussey

Essays come in a bewildering variety of shapes and forms: they can be the five paragraph essays you wrote in school — maybe for or against gun control or on symbolism in The Great Gatsby . Essays can be personal narratives or argumentative pieces that appear on blogs or as newspaper editorials. They can be funny takes on modern life or works of literary criticism. They can even be book-length instead of short. Essays can be so many things!

Perhaps you’ve heard the term “lyric essay” and are wondering what that means. I’m here to help.

What is the Lyric Essay?

A quick definition of the term “lyric essay” is that it’s a hybrid genre that combines essay and poetry. Lyric essays are prose, but written in a manner that might remind you of reading a poem.

Before we go any further, let me step back with some more definitions. If you want to know the difference between poetry and prose, it’s simply that in poetry the line breaks matter, and in prose they don’t. That’s it! So the lyric essay is prose, meaning where the line breaks fall doesn’t matter, but it has other similarities to what you find in poems.

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Lyric essays have what we call “poetic” prose. This kind of prose draws attention to its own use of language. Lyric essays set out to create certain effects with words, often, although not necessarily, aiming to create beauty. They are often condensed in the way poetry is, communicating depth and complexity in few words. Chances are, you will take your time reading them, to fully absorb what they are trying to say. They may be more suggestive than argumentative and communicate multiple meanings, maybe even contradictory ones.

Lyric essays often have lots of white space on their pages, as poems do. Sometimes they use the space of the page in creative ways, arranging chunks of text differently than regular paragraphs, or using only part of the page, for example. They sometimes include photos, drawings, documents, or other images to add to (or have some other relationship to) the meaning of the words.

Lyric essays can be about any subject. Often, they are memoiristic, but they don’t have to be. They can be philosophical or about nature or history or culture, or any combination of these things. What distinguishes them from other essays, which can also be about any subject, is their heightened attention to language. Also, they tend to deemphasize argument and carefully-researched explanations of the kind you find in expository essays . Lyric essays can argue and use research, but they are more likely to explore and suggest than explain and defend.

Now, you may be familiar with the term “ prose poem .” Even if you’re not, the term “prose poem” might sound exactly like what I’m describing here: a mix of poetry and prose. Prose poems are poetic pieces of writing without line breaks. So what is the difference between the lyric essay and the prose poem?

Honestly, I’m not sure. You could call some pieces of writing either term and both would be accurate. My sense, though, is that if you put prose and poetry on a continuum, with prose on one end and poetry on the other, and with prose poetry and the lyric essay somewhere in the middle, the prose poem would be closer to the poetry side and the lyric essay closer to the prose side.

Some pieces of writing just defy categorization, however. In the end, I think it’s best to call a work what the author wants it to be called, if it’s possible to determine what that is. If not, take your best guess.

Four Examples of the Lyric Essay

Below are some examples of my favorite lyric essays. The best way to learn about a genre is to read in it, after all, so consider giving one of these books a try!

Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine’s book Citizen counts as a lyric essay, but I want to highlight her lesser-known 2004 work. In Don’t Let Me Be Lonely , Rankine explores isolation, depression, death, and violence from the perspective of post-9/11 America. It combines words and images, particularly television images, to ponder our relationship to media and culture. Rankine writes in short sections, surrounded by lots of white space, that are personal, meditative, beautiful, and achingly sad.

Calamities by Renee Gladman

Calamities is a collection of lyric essays exploring language, imagination, and the writing life. All of the pieces, up until the last 14, open with “I began the day…” and then describe what she is thinking and experiencing as a writer, teacher, thinker, and person in the world. Many of the essays are straightforward, while some become dreamlike and poetic. The last 14 essays are the “calamities” of the title. Together, the essays capture the artistic mind at work, processing experience and slowly turning it into writing.

The Self Unstable by Elisa Gabbert

The Self Unstable is a collection of short essays — or are they prose poems? — each about the length of a paragraph, one per page. Gabbert’s sentences read like aphorisms. They are short and declarative, and part of the fun of the book is thinking about how the ideas fit together. The essays are divided into sections with titles such as “The Self is Unstable: Humans & Other Animals” and “Enjoyment of Adversity: Love & Sex.” The book is sharp, surprising, and delightful.

Bluets by Maggie Nelson

Bluets is made up of short essayistic, poetic paragraphs, organized in a numbered list. Maggie Nelson’s subjects are many and include the color blue, in which she finds so much interest and meaning it will take your breath away. It’s also about suffering: she writes about a friend who became a quadriplegic after an accident, and she tells about her heartbreak after a difficult break-up. Bluets is meditative and philosophical, vulnerable and personal. It’s gorgeous, a book lovers of The Argonauts shouldn’t miss.

It’s probably no surprise that all of these books are published by small presses. Lyric essays are weird and genre-defying enough that the big publishers generally avoid them. This is just one more reason, among many, to read small presses!

If you’re looking for more essay recommendations, check out our list of 100 must-read essay collections and these 25 great essays you can read online for free .

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A Guide to Lyric Essay Writing: 4 Evocative Essays and Prompts to Learn From

Poets can learn a lot from blurring genres. Whether getting inspiration from fiction proves effective in building characters or song-writing provides a musical tone, poetry intersects with a broader literary landscape. This shines through especially in lyric essays, a form that has inspired articles from the Poetry Foundation and Purdue Writing Lab , as well as become the concept for a 2015 anthology titled We Might as Well Call it the Lyric Essay.  

Put simply, the lyric essay is a hybrid, creative nonfiction form that combines the rich figurative language of poetry with the longer-form analysis and narrative of essay or memoir. Oftentimes, it emerges as a way to explore a big-picture idea with both imagery and rigor. These four examples provide an introduction to the writing style, as well as spotlight tips for creating your own.

1. Draft a “braided essay,” like Michelle Zauner in this excerpt from Crying in H Mart .

Before Crying in H Mart became a bestselling memoir, Michelle Zauner—a writer and frontwoman of the band Japanese Breakfast—published an essay of the same name in The New Yorker . It opens with the fascinating and emotional sentence, “Ever since my mom died, I cry in H Mart.” This first line not only immediately propels the reader into Zauner’s grief, but it also reveals an example of the popular “braided essay” technique, which weaves together two distinct but somehow related experiences. 

Throughout the work, Zauner establishes a parallel between her and her mother’s relationship and traditional Korean food. “You’ll likely find me crying by the banchan refrigerators, remembering the taste of my mom’s soy-sauce eggs and cold radish soup,” Zauner writes, illuminating the deeply personal and mystifying experience of grieving through direct, sensory imagery.

2. Experiment with nonfiction forms , like Hadara Bar-Nadav in “ Selections from Babyland . ”

Lyric essays blend poetic qualities and nonfiction qualities. Hadara Bar-Nadav illustrates this experimental nature in Selections from Babyland , a multi-part lyric essay that delves into experiences with infertility. Though Bar-Nadav’s writing throughout this piece showcases rhythmic anaphora—a definite poetic skill—it also plays with nonfiction forms not typically seen in poetry, including bullet points and a multiple-choice list. 

For example, when recounting unsolicited advice from others, Bar-Nadav presents their dialogue in the following way:

I heard about this great _____________.

a. acupuncturist

b. chiropractor

d. shamanic healer

e. orthodontist ( can straighter teeth really make me pregnant ?)

This unexpected visual approach feels reminiscent of an article or quiz—both popular nonfiction forms—and adds dimension and white space to the lyric essay.

3. Travel through time , like Nina Boutsikaris in “ Some Sort of Union .”

Nina Boutsikaris is the author of I’m Trying to Tell You I’m Sorry: An Intimacy Triptych , and her work has also appeared in an anthology of the best flash nonfiction. Her essay “Some Sort of Union,” published in Hippocampus Magazine , was a finalist in the magazine’s Best Creative Nonfiction contest. 

Since lyric essays are typically longer and more free verse than poems, they can be a way to address a larger idea or broader time period. Boutsikaris does this in “Some Sort of Union,” where the speaker drifts from an interaction with a romantic interest to her childhood. 

“They were neighbors, the girl and the air force paramedic. She could have seen his front door from her high-rise window if her window faced west rather than east,” Boutsikaris describes. “When she first met him two weeks ago, she’d been wearing all white, buying a wedge of cheap brie at the corner market.”

In the very next paragraph, Boutskiras shifts this perspective and timeline, writing, “The girl’s mother had been angry with her when she was a child. She had needed something from the girl that the girl did not know how to give. Not the way her mother hoped she would.”

As this example reveals, examining different perspectives and timelines within a lyric essay can flesh out a broader understanding of who a character is.

4. Bring in research, history, and data, like Roxane Gay in “ What Fullness Is .”

Like any other form of writing, lyric essays benefit from in-depth research. And while journalistic or scientific details can sometimes throw off the concise ecosystem and syntax of a poem, the lyric essay has room for this sprawling information.

In “What Fullness Is,” award-winning writer Roxane Gay contextualizes her own ideas and experiences with weight loss surgery through the history and culture surrounding the procedure. 

“The first weight-loss surgery was performed during the 10th century, on D. Sancho, the king of León, Spain,” Gay details. “He was so fat that he lost his throne, so he was taken to Córdoba, where a doctor sewed his lips shut. Only able to drink through a straw, the former king lost enough weight after a time to return home and reclaim his kingdom.”

“The notion that thinness—and the attempt to force the fat body toward a state of culturally mandated discipline—begets great rewards is centuries old.”

Researching and knowing this history empowers Gay to make a strong central point in her essay.

Bonus prompt: Choose one of the techniques above to emulate in your own take on the lyric essay. Happy writing!

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Wednesday, November 10, 2010

The seneca review: introducing, defining, and promoting the lyric essay.

Since its inception in 1970, the Seneca Review has published mostly poetry. As essayists, our interest in SR began roughly thirteen years ago, in Fall 1997, when the “lyric essay” made its first appearance. John D’Agata’s term as Associate Editor of SR began at about the same time, SR ’s website would lead me to believe.

Most recent posts have included some sort of disclaimer/full-disclosure clause, and mine is no exception. In fact, my disclosures are many: I love poetry. I know very little about poetry. I know even less about the lyric essay. What excites me most about SR is the fact that gifted essayist and fellow MFA candidate at the University of Arizona – Noam Dorr – will have a piece published in the next issue.

According to the SR website, here are a few things (I translated into bullet form) that the lyric essay does:

· The lyric essay partakes of the poem in its density and shapeliness, its distillation of ideas and musicality of language.

· The lyric essay partakes of the essay in its weight, in its overt desire to engage with facts, melding its allegiance to the actual with its passion for imaginative form.

· The lyric essay does not expound. It may merely mention.

· The lyric essay, generally, is short, concise and punchy like a prose poem. But it may meander, making use of other genres when they serve its purpose: recombinant, it samples the techniques of fiction, drama, journalism, song, and film.

· The lyric essay often accretes by fragments, taking shape mosaically - its import visible only when one stands back and sees it whole.

· The lyric essay stalks its subject like quarry but is never content to merely explain or confess. It elucidates through the dance of its own delving.

· The lyric essay sets off on an uncharted course through interlocking webs of idea, circumstance, and language - a pursuit with no foreknown conclusion, an arrival that might still leave the writer questioning.

· The lyric essay is ruminative; it leaves pieces of experience undigested and tacit, inviting the reader's participatory interpretation.

· The lyric essay’s voice is often more reticent, almost coy, aware of the compliment it pays the reader by dint of understatement.

The SR editors seem to envision the lyric essay as a kind of… minx? She desires. She merely mentions. She melds. She feigns coyness. She meanders. She’s punchy! She pursues. No, she stalks .

She leaves the writer questioning.

But what about the reader?

After all, for each thing that the lyric essay does, the lyric essay asks for the reader to do something in return – to follow the “uncharted course,” to synthesize the “webs of idea, circumstance, and language,” to assemble the fragments, to interpret the mosaic, and ultimately, to gain something.

In an interview that accompanies the Spring 2009 issue, Geoffrey Hilsabeck asks Dan Beachy-Quick, whose piece “The Laurel Crown” appears in the same issue, about this idea of the “lyric reader.” (A small, edited portion of the interview appears below.)

GH: If there can be lyric poets and lyric essayists, can there be lyric readers, or is that absurd?

DBQ: The lyric reader understands that the worth of reading isn’t some sum-knowledge. Rather, the lyric reader sings back out the world the reading gave her, and in doing so, in expressing and making exterior that world reading gave her, a world now also deeply her own, she offers that world back up to doubt and question. Singing is this offering not of doubt, but to doubt. This is why, in the reading I love the most, the same reading I write about, I do not feel I’ve learned anything, or gained anything, but feel more profoundly my ignorance, and if I learn anything, I learn how better to take advantage of that ignorance.

So again, the lyric essay is a … siren? I have to admit, I’m pretty intrigued by SR ’s recurrent depiction of the lyric essay as a kind of elusive woman, although I’m not sure if this concept is unique to SR or not. I’d guess not. But worth a little discussion, in any case, I think.

Notably, the most recent “special double issue” of SR for Fall 2009/Spring 2010 is titled “The Lyric Body,” and features pieces that address our corporeal lives. Pieces in this issue – most of which I found fascinating – tended to focus on the body as it changes - as it ages, travels, plays, dies, heals, etc. Not surprisingly, a significant number of the pieces in this issue also focus on the body in a state of peril or decline, as it faces death.

In the introductory essay, Stephen Kuusisto and Ralph James Savarese explain the reason for this thematic choice: “The body presents a form for engagement, the only one an organism has. That engagement is always political, whether we recognize it or not, and always lyrical, whether we see it that way or not.”

Clearly, SR seeks to engage readers who are interested in the more lyrical, experimental versions of the essay. And although I often find these forms inscrutable, I found most of the pieces I read in SR to be at once challenging and very accessible. I wanted to do the work that the essays were asking me to do - to be a “lyric reader.”

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Because the lyric essay is a new, hybrid form that combines poetry with essay, this form should be taught only at the intermediate to advanced levels. Even professional essayists aren’t certain about what constitutes a lyric essay, and lyric essays disagree about what makes up the form. For example, some of the “lyric essays” in magazines like The Seneca Review have been selected for the Best American Poetry series, even though the “poems” were initially published as lyric essays.

A good way to teach the lyric essay is in conjunction with poetry (see the Purdue OWL's resource on teaching Poetry in Writing Courses ). After students learn the basics of poetry, they may be prepared to learn the lyric essay. Lyric essays are generally shorter than other essay forms, and focus more on language itself, rather than storyline. Contemporary author Sherman Alexie has written lyric essays, and to provide an example of this form, we provide an excerpt from his Captivity :

"He (my captor) gave me a biscuit, which I put in my

pocket, and not daring to eat it, buried it under a log, fear-

ing he had put something in it to make me love him.

FROM THE NARRATIVE OF MRS. MARY ROWLANDSON,

WHO WAS TAKEN CAPTIVE WHEN THE WAMPANOAG

DESTROYED LANCASTER, MASSACHUSETS, IN 1676"

"I remember your name, Mary Rowlandson. I think of you now, how necessary you have become. Can you hear me, telling this story within uneasy boundaries, changing you into a woman leaning against a wall beneath a HANDICAPPED PARKING ONLY sign, arrow pointing down directly at you? Nothing changes, neither of us knows exactly where to stand and measure the beginning of our lives. Was it 1676 or 1976 or 1776 or yesterday when the Indian held you tight in his dark arms and promised you nothing but the sound of his voice?"

Alexie provides no straightforward narrative here, as in a personal essay; in fact, each numbered section is only loosely related to the others. Alexie doesn’t look into his past, as memoirists do. Rather, his lyric essay is a response to a quote he found, and which he uses as an epigraph to his essay.

Though the narrator’s voice seems to be speaking from the present, and addressing a woman who lived centuries ago, we can’t be certain that the narrator’s voice is Alexie’s voice. Is Alexie creating a narrator or persona to ask these questions? The concept and the way it’s delivered is similar to poetry. Poets often use epigraphs to write poems. The difference is that Alexie uses prose language to explore what this epigraph means to him.

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Consider the Platypus: Four Forms—Maybe—of the Lyric Essay

What is a lyric essay? Lyric comes from the late sixteenth century: from French lyrique or Latin lyricus, from Greek lurikos, from lura ‘lyre.’

To the ear, “lyre” and “liar” sound the same, which I resist because I do not condone lying in essays, lyric or otherwise. But mythology tells us that the origins of the lyre come from a kind of lie.

Hermes, the gods’ messenger and something of a trickster, stole Apollo’s sacred cattle. Hermes tried to deny his theft but ultimately confessed. In atonement, he gave Apollo a new way to make music: the lyre. Later Apollo taught Orpheus how to play the lyre and Orpheus became the best musician and poet known to humankind. He charmed trees, rocks, and rivers. While sailing with the Argonauts he overpowered the Sirens with his songs, allowing the ship and its crew to pass safely on their quest to find the Golden Fleece. And when his wife died, he sang his way into the underworld to retrieve her. His music was so powerful it could almost—almost—raise the dead.

Lyric essays have the same power to soothe, to harrow, to persuade, to move, to raise, to rouse, to overcome.

Like Orpheus and his songs, lyric essays try something daring. They rely more on intuition than exposition. They often use image more than narration. They question more than answer. But despite all this looseness, the lyric essay still has the responsibilities of any essay: to try to figure something out, to play with ideas, to show a shift in thinking (however subtle). The whole of a lyric essay adds up to more than the sum of its parts.

I came to define a lyric essay as:

a piece of writing with a visible / stand-out / unusual structure that explores / forecasts / gestures to an idea in an unexpected way

But about that visible / stand-out / unusual structure, that unexpected idea: Lyric essays are tricky. If you try to mount one to a spreading board, it’s likely to dodge the pin and fly away. If you try to press one between two slides, it might find a way to ooze down your sleeve. And if you try to set it within a taxonomy, it will pose the same problems as the platypus—a mammal, but one that lays eggs; semiaquatic, living in both water and on land; and venomous, a trait that belongs mostly to reptiles and insects. It will run away if on land—its gait that of a furry alligator—or swim off in the undulating way of beavers. Either way it can threaten you with a poisoned spur before it ripples off.

Despite its resistance to categorization, there are four broad forms of the lyric essay that are worth trying to define:

Flash Essays

origin Middle English (in the sense ‘splash water about’): probably imitative; compare with flush and splash

I define flash essays as being one thousand words or fewer. They are short, sharp, and clarifying. The shortest ones illuminate a moment or a realization the way a flash of light can illuminate a scene. Longer ones may take a little more time but regardless of their length, the meaning of the essay resonates more strongly than its word count might suggest.

Lightning flashes, as do cameras, flares, signals, and explosions; all show a brief moment in a larger scene. A small syringe can deliver a powerful drug. A capsule can too—unless it dissolves in a glass of water to reveal a paper flower. Regardless of their content, flash essays are imitative of their form. They give the reader a splash of a moment and leave us flushed with emotion and meaning.

Segmented Essays

origin late sixteenth century (as a term in geometry): from Latin segmentum, from secare ‘to cut’

Segmented essays are divided into segments that might be numbered or titled or simply separated with a space break.

These spaces—white space, blank space—allow the reader to pause, think, consider, and digest each segment before moving on to the next. Each section may contain something new, but all still belong cogently to the whole.

Segmented essays are also known as

(origin late Middle English: from French, or from Latin fragmentum, from frangere ‘to break’)

(origin mid-nineteenth century: from Greek parataxis, from para- ‘beside’ + taxis ‘arrangement’; from tassein ‘arrange’)

(origin early twentieth century: from French, literally ‘gluing’)

(origin late Middle English: from French mosaïque, based on Latin musi(v)um ‘decoration with small square stones,’ perhaps ultimately from Greek mousa ‘a muse’)

How you think of an essay may influence how you write it. Citrus fruits come in segments; so do worms. Each segment is part of an organic whole. But a fragmented essay may be broken on purpose and a collage deliberately glued together.

Braided Essays

origin Old English bregdan ‘make a sudden movement,’ also ‘interweave,’ of Germanic origin; related to Dutch breien (verb)

Braided essays are segmented essays whose sections have a repeating pattern—the way each strand of a braid returns to take its place in the center.

Each time a particular strand returns, its meaning is enriched by the other threads you’ve read through.

You can braid hair for containment or ornamentation. You can braid fibers into a basket to carry something or into a rope to tie something. Maybe it’s something you want to hold fast. Or maybe it’s to tense a kite against the wind—to fly.

Hermit Crab Essays

origin Middle English: from Old French hermite, from late Latin eremita, from Greek eremites, from eremos ‘solitary’

origin late sixteenth century (referring to hawks, meaning ‘claw or fight each other’): from Low German krabben

Hermit crab essays, as Brenda Miller named them in Tell It Slant , borrow another form of writing as their structure the way a hermit crab borrows another’s shell. These extraliterary structures can protect vulnerable content (the way the shell protects the crab), but they can also act as firm containers for content that might be intellectually or emotionally difficult, prodigious, or otherwise messy.

In life hermit crabs aren’t hermits at all; they’re quite social. And in a way hermit crab essays are too, because they depend on a network of other extraliterary forms of writing—recipes, labels, album notes—and what we already know of them.

I’ve always thought that a hermit crab’s front looks like a hand reaching out of the shell, a gesture that draws the onlooker inwards. Instead of needing a shell that protects, the contents of a hermit crab essay might lie in wait—like the pellets in a shotgun shell or a plumule of a seed—ready to burst beyond the confines of the form and take root in the reader’s mind.

But some of these forms overlap. A lyric essay can be many things at once—flash and braided, segmented and hermit crab—the way a square is also a rectangle, a parallelogram, a quadrilateral. One shape, but many ways of naming it.

Orpheus’s lyre accompanied him through all sorts of adventures. It traveled with him as deep as the underworld and after his death was sent by Zeus to live among the stars. You can see its constellation—Lyra—in the summer months if you live in the Northern Hemisphere, the winter months if you live in the Southern. This feels like an apt metaphor for the lyric essay: The stars are there, but their shape is what your mind brings to them.

A version of this essay was published as the introduction to A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays .

Randon Billings Noble is an essayist. Her collection  Be with Me Always   was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2019 and her anthology of lyric essays,  A Harp in the Stars ,  was published by Nebraska in 2021. Other work has appeared in the Modern Love column of  The New York Times, The Rumpus, Brevity,  and  Creative Nonfiction . Currently she is the founding editor of the online literary magazine  After the Art and teaches in West Virginia Wesleyan’s Low Residency MFA Program and Goucher’s MFA in Nonfiction Program. You can read more at her website,  www.randonbillingsnoble.com .

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The lyric essay.

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With its Fall 1997 issue, Seneca Review began to publish what we've chosen to call the lyric essay. The recent burgeoning of creative nonfiction and the personal essay has yielded a fascinating sub-genre that straddles the essay and the lyric poem. These "poetic essays" or "essayistic poems" give primacy to artfulness over the conveying of information. They forsake narrative line, discursive logic, and the art of persuasion in favor of idiosyncratic meditation.

The lyric essay partakes of the poem in its density and shapeliness, its distillation of ideas and musicality of language. It partakes of the essay in its weight, in its overt desire to engage with facts, melding its allegiance to the actual with its passion for imaginative form.

The lyric essay does not expound. It may merely mention. As Helen Vendler says of the lyric poem, "It depends on gaps. . . . It is suggestive rather than exhaustive." It might move by association, leaping from one path of thought to another by way of imagery or connotation, advancing by juxtaposition or sidewinding poetic logic. Generally it is short, concise and punchy like a prose poem. But it may meander, making use of other genres when they serve its purpose: recombinant, it samples the techniques of fiction, drama, journalism, song, and film.

Given its genre mingling, the lyric essay often accretes by fragments, taking shape mosaically - its import visible only when one stands back and sees it whole. The stories it tells may be no more than metaphors. Or, storyless, it may spiral in on itself, circling the core of a single image or idea, without climax, without a paraphrasable theme. The lyric essay stalks its subject like quarry but is never content to merely explain or confess. It elucidates through the dance of its own delving.

Loyal to that original sense of essay as a test or a quest, an attempt at making sense, the lyric essay sets off on an uncharted course through interlocking webs of idea, circumstance, and language - a pursuit with no foreknown conclusion, an arrival that might still leave the writer questioning. While it is ruminative, it leaves pieces of experience undigested and tacit, inviting the reader's participatory interpretation. Its voice, spoken from a privacy that we overhear and enter, has the intimacy we have come to expect in the personal essay. Yet in the lyric essay the voice is often more reticent, almost coy, aware of the compliment it pays the reader by dint of understatement.

What has pushed the essay so close to poetry? Perhaps we're drawn to the lyric now because it seems less possible (and rewarding) to approach the world through the front door, through the myth of objectivity. The life span of a fact is shrinking; similitude often seems more revealing than verisimilitude. We turn to the artist to reconcoct meaning from the bombardments of experience, to shock, thrill, still the racket, and tether our attention.

We turn to the lyric essay - with its malleability, ingenuity, immediacy, complexity, and use of poetic language - to give us a fresh way to make music of the world. But we must be willing to go out on an artistic limb with these writers, keep our balance on their sometimes vertiginous byways. Anne Carson, in her essay on the lyric, "Why Did I Awake Lonely Among the Sleepers" (Published in Seneca Review Vol. XXVII, no. 2) quotes Paul Celan. What he says of the poem could well be said of the lyric essay:

The poem holds its ground on its own margin.... The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author stays with it.

If the reader is willing to walk those margins, there are new worlds to be found.

-- Deborah Tall, Editor and John D'Agata, Associate Editor for Lyric Essays

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Article Contents

Bluets and the lyric essay, emerson’s ‘experience’, bluets and the string of beads.

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Emerson and the lyric essay in Maggie Nelson’s Bluets

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Georgia Walton, Emerson and the lyric essay in Maggie Nelson’s Bluets , English: Journal of the English Association , Volume 72, Issue 276-277, Spring-Summer 2023, Pages 55–67, https://doi.org/10.1093/english/efad012

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This article examines the previously underacknowledged influence of nineteenth-century writer Ralph Waldo Emerson on the contemporary essayist and memoirist Maggie Nelson, in particular the 2009 book-length essay Bluets . Nelson’s hybrid texts have often been seen as key examples of the quintessentially contemporary genre of the lyric essay. My argument here complicates the claims of originality that have been made for this genre and instead identifies Nelson’s formal concerns as the product of a profound engagement with a nineteenth-century model. Through my analysis of Bluets , I suggest that Emerson’s influence is key to understanding Nelson’s formal hybridity and, in turn, her particular representation of the relationship between the subject and the world. Through her engagement with Emerson, Nelson arrives at an understanding of subjecthood that is based on a radical dependency but that is also individually defined and self-sufficient.

People love to talk about unclassifiable creative nonfiction as a recent invention, but what on God’s green earth are Emerson’s essays? Genre-wise, and sentence by sentence, they are some of the strangest, most inspiring pieces of nonfiction that I know. 1

Nelson suggests that Emerson’s essays complicate the claims of originality that have sometimes been made for the recent proliferation of hybrid texts by Anne Boyer, Claudia Rankine, and Olivia Laing that all mix the literary with the documentary and the personal with the critical. 2 Emerson’s essays inhabit a space between literature and philosophy. They combine theoretical observations on the world and the self with a poetic, gestural mode of expression. The legacy of his aphoristic, ‘sentence by sentence’ style of writing is evident in Nelson’s own prose, which can be seen for instance in the way in which it moves fluidly from one idea to another. In addition to this evidence of his impact on style, she regularly quotes from his essays in her published works; though mentioned only once in The Argonauts , he is frequently cited in the earlier memoir Bluets (2009) and referenced in the critical works, The Art of Cruelty (2011) and On Freedom (2021). Despite Nelson’s clear indebtedness to Emerson both in these works and elsewhere, critics and reviewers alike have not acknowledged his recurrent appearance in, or influence on, her writing. This is, in part, because he is one of numerous references in her work. Nelson is known for the way in which she repeatedly cites artists, philosophers, and critical theorists alongside personal reflection. For instance, she regularly quotes from Ludwig Wittgenstein and Roland Barthes. Critics have emphasized her inheritance from writers such as Eileen Myles, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Judith Butler, concentrating on her texts’ investments in queer theory. 3 However, Emerson, to whom she repeatedly returns in multiple texts, is an overlooked influence on her work.

In this article I directly address her inheritance from him in Bluets , showing how he influences both the formal construction of this hybrid memoir and, in turn, the way in which it represents subjecthood as fundamentally intersubjective and relational. I read Bluets in relation to Emerson’s essay ‘Experience’ (1844). My analysis focusses on a trope common to both Emerson and Nelson; I suggest that the fragmentary form of Bluets is profoundly influenced by Emerson’s statement in ‘Experience’ (1844) that ‘Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue’. 4 The numbered propositions of Nelson’s text function as sequential beads, or lenses, through which its ‘I’ sees the world. At the same time, the closed off beads in Bluets represent the relationship between the subjects and the other as oppositional, the self is defined against the other.

The circular image of the bead is a type of, what Caroline Levine has called a, ‘bounded whole’. 5 It offers ways of delineating between the internal and the external. The negotiation of what is within and what is without the boundaries of selfhood is key to Nelson’s use of this image. Though it erects a boundary, what it contains is neither fixed nor monolithic. Levine sees the forms of literary texts as able to hold difference and bring together contrasting elements. Furthermore, she writes that while unifying forms ‘impos[e] limits’, they also ‘makes thinking possible’. 6 The circular image that Nelson borrows from Emerson offers these affordances. The beads are defined forms, but they juxtapose changing ideas and contrasting perspectives, structuring thought in order to articulate it. In doing so they signify a discrete identity, but one that is also pliable, able to be challenged, altered, and influenced.

The combination of subjective experience and theoretical or philosophical engagement is a key aspect of Emerson’s writing. His essays expound the primacy of individual perspective and both his work and that of his fellow transcendentalists is associated with philosophies of individualism. Emerson’s essay ‘Self-Reliance’ (1841), a key example of this concern in his work, explains the importance of developing an independent outlook. He writes there, that ‘the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude’. 7 As well as this individualistic attitude, his essays are characterized by the use of metaphor and image through which they articulate their idiosyncratic perspectives. They are also well-known for their lack of logic and the inconsistency of statements both within and between them. This is something that Emerson explicitly endorses as, for instance, in ‘Self-Reliance’ where he famously proclaims that ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds’. 8 Borrowing from Emerson’s use of metaphor and symbolism, Nelson develops an imagistic and densely patterned style with a strong impression of formal unity through which she represents individual identity as self-contained and defined. Though, as I go on to show here, both this formal unity and defined identity are also mutable and able to hold difference. In this manner she also inherits from the multiplicity and refusal of consistency that characterizes Emerson’s work.

My suggestion that Nelson’s engagement with Emerson allows her to arrive at a mode of writing that emphasizes intersubjectivity and relationality may seem at odds with his suggestion in ‘Self-Reliance’ that ‘Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members’. 9 Emerson explicitly rejects the idea of society, seeing it as promoting conformity and suppressing the distinctiveness of individual subjects. Instead, he sees independent thought as central to personhood. However, my suggestion that he influences Nelson’s representation of an interrelated subjectivity fits in with recent critical work on him and other transcendentalist writers such as Margaret Fuller and Walt Whitman. Benjamin Reiss has applied the insights of disability studies to show that transcendentalism was not a purely individualistic enterprise. Through biographically focussed readings of Emerson, Fuller and Whitman, he argues that they ‘all felt the material effects of disability on their own capacity to produce work [and] were attuned to the importance of interdependency’. 10 My reading of Emerson’s impact on Nelson’s work thus corresponds with recent critical re-evaluations of his writing. Emerson’s influence on the formal construction of Nelson’s texts causes her to arrive at an idea of selfhood that is both self-reliant and interdependent.

In the quotation with which I began, Nelson describes Emerson as a forerunner to contemporary works of ‘creative nonfiction’. This is a catch-all term that implies the use of literary techniques to present a factual account. While Nelson’s writing can be classified under this broad umbrella, the term itself is too vague to be particularly helpful. Instead, following on from the work of John D’Agata and Deborah Tall, I categorize Bluets as a ‘lyric essay’. 11 These are works that combine elements of poetry and of essays. The term connotes the poetic style of writing in Nelson’s texts as well as their combination of theoretical and personal themes. Because of this it is more encompassing than the terms autotheory and critical autobiography which have often been used to describe the works of Nelson and others (such as Ben Lerner and Rachel Cusk). 12 Those terms emphasize the mixture of theoretical and autobiographical modes in Nelson’s writing. However, these are only two of the three elements of Nelson’s formal hybridity that interest me here – the personal and the theoretical, but not the poetic. The lyric essay suggests all three. In particular it suggests a link with lyric poetry, a form that is often seen to be the expression or representation of a particular subjectivity. However, the relationship between D’Agata and Tall’s term and previous definitions of the lyric is somewhat undertheorized, something I rectify here. In my analysis of Nelson’s texts, I consider some of the connections between lyric essays and lyric poetry.

One of the main ways I do this is through a discussion of the figure of apostrophe, a key element of the latter form. Apostrophe, as a figure of speech in which the speaker addresses an absent person, concept, or thing, is fundamentally linked to the way in which the subject defines themself against, or relates to, the other. Therefore, it is the most pertinent feature of the lyric to the argument of this chapter. In particular, I show how Nelson subverts apostrophe’s suggestion of an absent other through the use of an epistolary form. This is a decision that she explicitly refers to in the text. In Bluets , when discussing Leonard Cohen’s song ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ (1971), she writes: ‘The song features Cohen at his most lugubrious and opaque, which is saying a lot, but I have always loved its final line – “Sincerely, L. Cohen” – as it makes me feel less alone in composing almost everything I write as a letter’. 13 The epistolary form subverts apostrophe because, though it addresses an absent other, it is usually with the intention that that other will eventually read it. Therefore, though a self-contained expression of an individual perspective, it is a form of communication designed to convey thought and feeling to a particular individual. Bluets is addressed to a you, though as I go on to show, its aim to communicate effectively with an other is accompanied by varying levels of anxiety.

Bluets is an important example of a lyric essay and is often discussed in articles that theorize the form more generally. 14 It is laid out in 240 short propositions which contain personal, philosophical, and critical reflections on the colour blue. These fragmentary propositions are arranged in a free-flowing stream. Though all written in prose, they are composed in a lyrical, rhythmic style reminiscent of poetry. Nelson shifts between them without a sense of chronology or particular thematic linkage (aside from the focus on blue). Despite the lack of perceivable logic, there are characters and narrative threads that run throughout, creating subtle coherence. The most important of these are the end of a relationship with a lover who is dubbed the ‘prince of blue’ and the care of a friend rendered quadriplegic after a cycling accident. 15 As the focus on blue suggests, the book expresses and explores the experiences of heartbreak, grief, and solitude.

Critical work on Nelson’s texts has primarily discussed her blend of critical theory and personal reflection. The later book The Argonauts has been the focus of the most scholarly attention, much of this looking at the ways in which it is both influenced by and extends twentieth-century queer and feminist traditions of confessional writing. 16 Likewise, Bluets has also been the focus of critical work which encompasses queer themes, for instance its engagement with twentieth-century figures such as Derek Jarman, but with an additional focus on its form. 17 Here, I identify an alternative genealogy which reads the text in relation to nineteenth-century forms and ideas about subjectivity. While the vast majority of critical attention to Nelson’s work has looked at these twentieth-century influences, one article does attend to Emerson’s presence in The Argonauts , however this remains focussed on her engagements with queer theory. Katie Collins argues that Nelson’s text borrows the concept of ‘thinning’ from Emerson as a way of revisioning the ‘queer negativity’ of Leo Bersani’s 1987 essay ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ 18 My argument also shows how Nelson invokes Emerson to move away from the pessimism of some twentieth-century schools of thought. However, I attend instead to the way in which the hybrid form of Bluets is shaped through an engagement with Emerson which in turn helps her to conceive of the subject as composite and socially formed.

Bluets opens with a hypothesis: ‘Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color.’ 19 What follows is a stream of consciousness meditation on the colour blue. Though Nelson’s prose is free flowing and digressive, these meditations are organized into numbered propositions that are at most 200 words long. In these propositions Nelson discusses blues found in artworks, literature, song lyrics, film, nature, and the built environment. For example, she positions references to works by Joseph Cornell, Joni Mitchell, Billie Holiday, Andy Warhol, and Leonard Cohen alongside descriptions of scraps of tarpaulin and the nest of the male bowerbird who collects blue objects for his elaborate mating ritual. As she details her love of blue objects and artworks, she also references the experiments and inventions of scientists such as Isaac Newton and Horace Bénédict de Sassaure who investigated the nature of colour perception and tried to measure the blue of the sky. Throughout these meandering meditations, Nelson reflects on the nature of sensory perception and its relationship to emotion; the text plays on the idea of ‘the blues’ as a depressive emotional state. Its magpie-like (or bowerbird-like) arrangement of blue objects, artworks, and anecdotes works as a conduit for Nelson’s consideration of grief, loneliness, and depression. In Bluets then, as well as being representative of personal emotion, the colour blue is also a vehicle for phenomenological enquiry. Nelson uses its multiple manifestations and connotations to broach questions about the ways in which the subject perceives the world. I suggest here that these combined uses of the colour blue means that it functions in Bluets as a metaphor for the form of the lyric essay itself. It represents the qualities that the lyric essay is seen to hybridize: namely the presentation of an individual perspective, complex, evocative language, the deployment of critical arguments based on observation, and the critical appraisal of art and literature. In order to develop this line of argument, I will now briefly reflect on the critical definition of this form.

The lyric essay is a sub-genre or offshoot of the term creative non-fiction and both are a product of the creative writing courses and writing workshops in American universities that grew exponentially in the late twentieth century. 20 Ned Stuckey-French argues that the term lyric essay was coined in reaction to the idea that essays present empirically verifiable information in a systematic manner. 21 Indeed, in the introduction to the Seneca Review Special Issue on the form, D’Agata and Tall define it as borrowing from the poem ‘in its density and shapeliness, its distillation of ideas and musicality of language’ and from the essay ‘in its weight, in its overt desire to engage with facts, melding its allegiance to the actual with its passion for imaginative form’. 22 They argue that it encompasses both ‘poetic essays’ and ‘essayistic poems’ that ‘give primacy to artfulness over the conveying of information’. 23 The main feature of the lyric essay is then its refusal to present its content in the systematic or argumentative manner usually associated with critical writing. It does this particularly through its allusion to poetry. D’Agata and Tall use the word lyric in order to signify a poetic mode of expression or a self-consciously literary use of language. However, as I briefly suggested above, it does more than signify the ‘imaginative’ use of form. Instead, it implies links with lyric poetry, a relationship I will now set out in more depth.

In what is arguably the most important critical study of the lyric, Jonathon Culler writes that the conventional idea of the lyric poet was of a writer who ‘absorbs into himself the external world and stamps it with inner consciousness, and the unity of the poem is provided by this subjectivity’ (though Culler challenges this idea, it endures in critical conceptions of the form). 24 Nelson’s employment of Emersonian imagery in Bluets creates the unity that Culler describes. Through the focus on blue and the use of Emerson’s string of beads, Nelson creates a densely patterned text with an internal cohesion. In fact, the circular motif that imposes this unity is itself a metaphor for the subjectivity that the work expresses. This unity is both produced by and helps to develop the representation of a defined sense of self in the text. Moreover, Culler says that lyric poems ‘illuminate or interpret the world for us’. 25 This definition bears many similarities to D’Agata and Tall’s seminal definition of the lyric essay in that it combines attention to the world with an imaginative mode. This imaginative mode of expression is an expression of subjectivity. Both the lyric essay and the lyric poem dramatize the subject viewing the world. The lyric essay differs from lyric poetry then, in its closer ties to the essay’s ‘allegiance to fact’. It self-consciously reworks a form that relies on systematic argument and ‘fact’ but undercuts these through the deployment and consideration of its own subjective viewpoint.

Both these modes are encompassed in Nelson’s use of the colour blue. In Bluets , blue is an observable part of the external world and thus subject to scientific enquiry; it is the medium and subject of visual, literary, and musical artists; and it is a condition of inner life, an affective state. The first and last of these are, to some extent, paradoxical ways of approaching knowledge. This paradox is one of the central features of the lyric essay which includes facts, empirical evidence, and analysis alongside its articulation of personal ways of seeing. Throughout Bluets , through her myriad uses of the colour blue, Nelson tries to reconcile these two ways of thinking about experience and knowledge.

79. For just because one loves blue does not mean that one wants to spend one’s life in a world made of it. ‘Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many coloured lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus,’ wrote Emerson. To find oneself trapped in any one bead, not matter what its hue, can be deadly. 26

Emerson speaks of the inner mood metaphorically colouring the individual’s observation of the world. In Bluets , Nelson literalizes this metaphor. The text is filled with blue objects, through which its speaker considers the external world and her relationships with others. By collaging references to blue things, Nelson creates a blue bead through which she invites her reader to view the world. Indeed, this literalism can be seen in the text when, a few pages after this proposition, Nelson continues to refer to Emerson’s metaphor. The speaker says, ‘I have made efforts, however fitful, to live within other beads’, before telling us how she bought a tin of yellow paint and painted her whole apartment with it. 27 The string of beads offers a method for thinking about the way in which the form of Bluets produces the relationship between the self and the external world. The metaphor has two connotations that are present in Bluets : first, that the inner life and experience of the external world are mediated through vision, and secondly, that the subject moves through multiple different ways of relating to the world. Through her primary subject of the colour blue, Nelson uses vision to understand the relationship between inner life and observation and through the text’s shifting numbered propositions, she represents experience as ever-changing and sequential. Alexandra Parsons sees Wittgenstein and Goethe as the ‘primary influences’ on Nelson’s use of colour as a way of exploring how to communicate experiences of pain (either emotional or physical). 28 I instead suggest here that Emerson’s metaphor of the string of beads, and its concomitant idea of coloured lenses, are central to understanding the way in which Bluets negotiates empirical and personal modes of writing.

The two modes that the lyric essay hybridizes are also evident in Emerson’s essays, which are often seen to inhabit a space between philosophy and literature. They reject the systematic construction of argument and refuse to develop specific moral positions. As Stanley Cavell writes, Emerson was a writer ‘famously intimidated by formal argument’. 29 This quality in his work has often led to a confusion about where to place him in terms of discipline: are his essays philosophy or literature? Though Cavell’s work on Emerson has done much to rehabilitate him as a philosopher in the twentieth century, as Joseph Urbas points out, Cavell’s readings themselves refuse logical parameters. 30 This refusal to present logical arguments both within Emerson’s work and in his, arguably, most influential recent critic, allows us to trace a tradition of philosophical writing that refuses coherence and the formal conventions of argument. Thus, we see the boundary between literature and philosophy being challenged within the latter discipline also. The lyric essay develops a scholar-subject and thus challenges the idea of knowledge as something verifiable and objective. In the work of Cavell, we find an example of Emerson-influenced philosophical work that also does this. ‘Experience’, composed in the wake of the death of Emerson’s young son Waldo is notable in his oeuvre for the way in which it draws on personal experience while also offering abstracted and philosophical propositions.

Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. From the mountain you see the mountain. We animate what we can, and we see only what we animate. Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man, whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem. There are always sunsets, and there is always genius; but only a few hours so serene that we can relish nature or criticism. The more or less depends on structure or temperament. Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung. 31

Emerson characterizes mood as colour in order to show how an individual’s emotions alter the way in which they look at the world. This alteration is both literal and figurative. He speaks of nature and books; the reference to nature suggests the literal and immediate act of seeing the physical world, whereas books suggest intellectual, artistic, and emotional consideration of it. Both types of knowledge acquisition are transformed by the state of mind in which the subject arrives at them. For Emerson this highly subjective empirical experience is a changeable phenomenon; the subject moves through different perspectives or ‘moods’, which continuously alters her experience of the world. The metaphor is fundamentally about vision. Emerson sees the beads as lenses. Whilst lenses enable vision, they also limit it. They provide a frame or boundary which forecloses any wider vantage point. The bead itself is a ‘bounded whole’, a self-contained and fixed circle that has a limiting power to cohere. This cohesion is here the self-contained logic of depression; the subject trapped within their own bead can only see the world through their own perspective, which takes on an internal and, to them, inarguable logic. Emerson’s image of the mountain further resists notions of an expansive vision. This image suggests that, though we might think we can reach a point at which we can survey the world from a position of detachment, what we really see is the foundation of our perspective. He thus suggests that the idea of critical detachment or claims to objectivity are forms of self-knowledge, or knowledge produced by the self. You can only ever see from the ground on which you are standing. The subject is only able to gain more insight into their own embodied position.

Standing on the bare ground, – my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. 32

In this celebrated image, Emerson describes a complete dissolution of the ego and of the body through the act of looking. The observer becomes one with the thing that she observes, here nature in its entirety. This is completely reversed in ‘Experience’ where the object of observation is entirely transformed by the inner emotional state of the viewer. Indeed, in the later essay, he writes that, ‘Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them’ rather than the erosion of the seer that is found in the transparent eyeball. 33 With the transparent eyeball there is an immediacy to the act of looking, the subject is represented as comprising of pure unmediated vision. In ‘Experience’ the beads repeat the spherical imagery and transparent nature of the eyeball, but instead the subject is trapped within them, rather than dissolving itself. Furthermore, in ‘Nature’, all space and time is collapsed into the expansive vision of a single moment. This is something that is also inverted with the string of beads. In this later metaphor, vision is limited, constrained but also linear. The subject moves from one perspective to another but cannot access either the expansive vision found in ‘Nature’ or their own previous perspectives. As Emerson writes in ‘Circles’ – a line that Nelson partially quotes in bluet 234. – ‘Our moods do not believe in each other. To-day I am full of thoughts, and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the same thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow’. 34 The string of beads suggests a perspective that is limited and changeable but not cumulative.

7. But what kind of love is it, really? Don’t fool yourself and call it sublimity. Admit that you have stood in front of a little pile of ultramarine pigment in a glass cup at a museum and felt a stinging desire. But to do what? Liberate it? Purchase it? Ingest it? There is so little blue food in nature – in fact blue in the wild tends to mark food to avoid (mold, poisonous berries) – that culinary advisers generally recommend against blue light, blue paint, and blue plates when serving food. But while the color may sap appetite in the most literal sense, it feeds it in others. You might want to reach out and disturb the pile of pigment, for example, first staining your fingers with it, then staining the world. You might want to dilute it and swim in it, you might want to rouge your nipples with it, you might want to paint a virgin’s robe with it. But still you wouldn’t be accessing the blue of it. Not exactly. 38

Throughout the text, the colour blue alternates between being a way of seeing and an object of desire or observation. Here it is the latter. Typical modes of mastery such as owning, and ingesting are not available, so the speaker hypothesizes about situations in which she might attempt to learn more about blue: immersing herself in it, using it to decorate her own body, and using it as a tool of artistic representation. In her equation of desire and research, Nelson emphasizes the erotics of scholarship, suggesting that the pursuit of knowledge is motivated by eros. However, none of these actions afford access to the colour itself. Instead, the speaker remains painfully separated from the object, the blue which she cannot access. This means that her knowledge is limited, she cannot gain a full knowledge of what she observes.

88. Like many self-help books, The Deepest Blue is full of horrifyingly simple language and some admittedly good advice. Somehow the women in the book all learn to say: That’s my depression talking. It’s not “me”. 89. As if we could scrape the colour off the iris and still see. 39

In this passage, blue becomes a part of the apparatus of sight. In this way, Nelson’s speaker occupies a comparable position to that found in Emerson’s string of beads; her perception of the external world cannot be divorced from her inner life. The very lens with which one views the world is coloured by mood. Nelson’s metaphor here collapses Emerson’s transparent eyeball and string of beads together. The colour of the iris becomes the coloured glass of the bead. In the passage this has the effect of recognizing the impossibility of separating one’s depression from oneself. In using the colour of the iris as a metaphor for subjective viewpoint, Nelson collapses the subjective viewpoint with the object, or cathexis, here the colour blue. Despite saying that she does not want to live within blue – ‘For just because one loves blue does not mean that one wants to spend one’s life in a world made of it’ – Nelson makes the colour of the eye itself the mode of engaging with the world. The speaker thus takes up an auto-erotic position, in which the cathected object is part of her own body. In doing so she collapses the distance between subject and object.

She hopes to achieve this integration through the act of writing, in particular through writing a letter. As I suggested in the introduction to this article, Nelson structures her lyric essays as letters as a subversion of the lyric apostrophe. Discussing the trope more generally Culler argues that ‘the vocative of apostrophe is a device which the poetic voice uses to establish with an object a relationship that helps to constitute him’. 40 The use of apostrophe is ‘an invocation of the muse’ that cements the poet’s own status as a poet. 41 Furthermore, it also has a sorrowful and elegiac tone. As Denis Flannery shows ‘apostrophe is caught up with mourning and the elegiac, a capacity to articulate and direct grief’. 42 This elegiac mode is apparent in both Bluets and ‘Experience’ which explicitly reflect on loss, loneliness, and grief. However, both Emerson and Nelson resist the conventional element of apostrophe as invoking the muse purely for the development of the poetic subjectivity. Instead, they aim for a more communicative mode that really hopes to address the absent other rather than merely define themselves against it. A genuine interest in the addressee is evident throughout Emerson’s work. A prolific letter writer, he was attentive to the way in which the writing subject was constructed in relation to the recipient. Furthermore, as a popular public speaker Emerson was used to writing for an audience whom he would perform in front of. As Tom F. Wright has shown, Emerson’s essays questioned the relationship between the individual and the self by being constructed as though they were addressing an embodied audience. 43 They transform apostrophe then, by imagining a present other rather than an absent one. In this, they are written with the express desire of communicating something to a receptive listener in that moment.

There remains the question of how the apostrophe works as it is adapted for the lyric essay. I suggest here that it operates as an assertion of the position of an empirical observer of the world while also being concerned with the subject position of a poet. Therefore, the subject of the lyric essay is simultaneously constructed as both scholar and poet which, in turn, redefines the scholar-subject more generally as a lyrical subjective position. This presents a challenge to traditional ideas about the construction of knowledge. The knowledge in the lyric essay is always being presented as highly subjective and therefore rejects the notion of a truth that exists outside of individual perception. Bluets presents any critical analysis or research about blue through the lens of an idiosyncratic perspective that is coloured by mood and affect. Therefore, its speaker is both observer and feeling subject. This view does not correspond with previous criticism on the lyric essay. In an article in which she analyses Bluets , Corrina Cook argues that ‘the lyric essay’s narrator is best understood not as a speaker at all, but as a listener’. 44 Though I agree that Bluets sees subjecthood as interrelational and therefore receptive (perhaps through the act of listening) to the external world, Nelson’s subversion of apostrophe shows the text to be one entirely about articulating one’s own viewpoint through writing.

177. Perhaps it is becoming clearer why I felt no romance when you told me that you carried my last letter around with you, everywhere you went, for months on end, unopened. This may have served some purpose for you, but whatever it was, surely it bore little resemblance to mine. I never aimed to give you a talisman, an empty vessel to flood with whatever longing, dread, or sorrow happened to be the day’s mood. I wrote it because I had something to say to you. 45

In this passage Nelson rejects the mystery and romance of the unsayable or the incommunicable. In doing so, she refuses the conventions of apostrophe. Instead of addressing an absent other through whom she constructs an authorial voice, she states explicitly that she wrote in order to communicate something. The presence of this unread letter in the text represents an anxiety about the communicative potential of writing. But perhaps, also a delusion about the nature of the relationship between writer and addressee in letter-writing. Nelson’s ex-boyfriend transforms the letter into a symbol and, in doing so, renders its content irrelevant. This is a gendered relation that recalls unread or undisclosed letters throughout the Western canon, for example in Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1844) or Thomas Hardy’s Tess of The D’Urbervilles (1891). Lacan’s reading of Poe’s story sees the holder of letter of the title as ‘exud[ing] the […] odor di femina’. 46 He argues that the letter – the content of which is never revealed to the reader – is a ‘pure-signifier’ and ‘by nature symbol only of absence’. 47 The unread letter is thus a signifier of feminine lack or absence. Lacan argues that a chain of triangulated intersubjective relationships is organized around the letter. In Bluets , Nelson and the receiver of the letter are involved in a love triangle with a third woman. 48 She is unhappy when she sees a photo of her lover with the other woman wearing the blue shirt he claimed to have worn especially for her on their last meeting. 49 Nelson is hurt by her own replaceability in this intersubjective relation. Her anger at the unread letter is an anger at being reduced to a lack in the male symbolic order. The loss of this letter signifies the failure of the female subject to be heard in male systems of communication. With the unread letter in the text Nelson both articulates an anxiety about the letter that is Bluets , but also challenges male psychoanalytic discourse that reduces feminine language to symbols and lacks. Through the form of the letter, Nelson resists the use of apostrophe. Addressing her writing to a reader who refuses to read it, but whom she intended to engage with it. Nevertheless, though the epistolary form is an attempt to subvert apostrophe, it here continues to be addressed to an unhearing, unreading other.

However, though it may not always succeed in conveying thought and feeling precisely to another, the act of writing structures thought. This sense of structure is found in the string of beads as they appear in ‘Experience’. Despite the multiplicity of, and distinction between, the perspectives that the beads suggest, there is a thread of continuity that runs through them. Emerson writes, ‘Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung’. This wire suggests some stable idea of identity and selfhood. Though moods may change, they have a vein of consistency running through them. This iron wire provides a strong yet flexible thread running through the centre of the beads. The sequential nature of the string of beads picks up the stair metaphor with which Emerson begins Experience’ and that we have already seen in the Introduction. In the stair metaphor, the subject seems to have vision beyond their current position; they stand atop their accumulated experience, upon which they can look down. However, Emerson describes a particular moment of becoming aware to this; ‘we’ are jolted into the realization of our position in a trajectory. The awareness of the past is only vague – ‘there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended [emphasis mine]’ – and the future remains unknown. Emerson thus suggests some sense of stable identity, though one that we are only occasionally aware of. The figure suddenly alert to their position on the stair occupies the same space as the figure on the mountain who realizes she can only see from her own situation. However, it is only a momentary realization, instead the subject is usually contained within their own ‘dream’ or ‘illusion’.

Writing is, in fact, an astonishing equalizer. I could have written half of these propositions drunk or high, for instance, and half sober; I could have written half in agonized tears, and half in a state of clinical detachment. But now that they have been shuffled around countless times – now that they have been made to appear, at long last, running forward as one river – how could either of us tell the difference? 51

Nelson describes the way in which disparate perspectives or viewpoints are fashioned into a linear, seemingly free-flowing narrative. The finished text imposes narrative structure onto the experiences being described. This leads to the diminishment of affect. Different moods are balanced by one another. Parsons argues that ‘ Bluets generates meaning through juxtaposition’. 52 The text is narrated in an almost detached, gestural mode and sense is made through the relationship between the different moments. Just as a photo album juxtaposes moments in a life, so too, does Bluets . The string of beads thus becomes a useful way of thinking about the way in which the self is narrativized; the subject can only perceive their experience as linear, but it is singular moments organized into a linear narrative. This is where the essayistic element of the lyric essay can be seen most prominently. The essay form also systematizes and organizes knowledge or ideas into a linear order, unlike a more traditionally poetic mode in which there is often unity and repetition in images and sounds. The form of Bluets structures thought. It both contains and organizes knowledge and subjectivity, but through this structuring it creates a distance from the affective experience described.

This ambivalence about affect is stereotypically Emersonian. In a highly influential departure from previous critical work on ‘Experience’, Sharon Cameron argues that the essay is an ‘impersonal’ text. 53 She shows that Emerson’s partial description of the effect of his son’s death on his world view represents the erasure of personal subjectivity. Bluets similarly mediates its representation of the personal through a certain detachment. It speaks from the self, but also analyses the self. Through the metaphor of the string of beads, both Emerson and Nelson collapse the subject with the object through the act of writing. In doing so, they both exalt the personal but simultaneously present it as a fiction that is produced through the text.

Author Biography

Georgia Walton is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute (LAHRI). She works on American literature and culture from the nineteenth century to the present.

This research was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/L503848/1].

Maggie Nelson, ‘American Classics that Influenced the Writing of The Argonauts ’, Library of America (2015) < https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/660-maggie-nelson-american-classics-that-influenced-the-writing-of-_the-argonauts > [accessed 1 July 2021].

Boyer’s 2019 The Undying is part cancer memoir, part examination of the culture and systems that surround sickness and medical care in the USA. Rankine’s bestselling Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) combines elements of poetry, essays, and documentary in its portrayal of race relations in America. Laing’s The Lonely City (2017) draws on personal experience whilst also analysing representations of loneliness in visual art.

See the five articles included in ‘Dossier: The Argonauts as Queer Object’, Angelaki , 23:1 (2018) 187–213.

Emerson, ‘Experience’, p. 30.

Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 27.

Levine, p. 47.

Emerson, ‘Self-Reliance’, in Collected Works , II, pp. 25–52 (p. 31).

Ibid., p. 33.

Ibid., p. 25.

Rachel Heffner-Burns et al., ‘The Year in Conferences—2020’, ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture , 67:1 (2021), 279–348 (p. 346).

John D’Agata and Deborah Tall, ‘New Terrain: The Lyric Essay’, Seneca Review , 72:1 (1997), 7–8.

See Laura Di Summa Koop, ‘Critical Autobiography: A New Genre?’ Journal of Aesthetics & Culture , 9:1 (2017), 1–12.

Maggie Nelson, Bluets (Seattle, WA: Wave Books, 2009), p. 41.

See Joe Parson’s ‘Walking with a Purpose: The Essay in Contemporary Nonfiction’, Textual Practice , 32:8 (2018), 1277–99 and Corrina Cook, ‘Listening the Lyric Essay’, New Writing , 16:1 (2019), 100–15.

Bluets , p. 6.

It was the popularity of The Argonauts on both sides of the Atlantic that led to the reissue of Bluets in the UK and a general rise in critical interest in Nelson’s earlier works.

Alexandra Parsons, ‘A Meditation on Color and the Body in Derek Jarman’s Chroma and Maggie Nelson's Bluets ’, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies , 33:2 (2018), 375–93.

Katie Collins, ‘The Morbidity of Maternity: Radical Receptivity in Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts ’, Criticism , 61:3 (2019), 311–34 (pp. 312, 314).

Bluets , p. 1.

In 1986 the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) noted that ‘the fastest growing creative writing programs are in nonfiction’; Mary Rose, Associated Writing Programs, Telephone Conversation (2 November 2000), quoted by Douglas Hesse, ‘The Place of Creative Nonfiction’, in Creative Nonfiction , a special issue of College English 65:3 (2003), 237–41 (p. 238).

Ned Stuckey-French, ‘Creative Nonfiction and the Lyric Essay: The American Essay in the Twenty-First Century’, in On Essays: Montaigne to the Present , ed. by Thomas Karshan and Kathryn Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 293–312.

D’Agata and Tall, p. 7.

Jonathan Culler, The Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), p. 2.

Ibid., p. 5.

Bluets , pp. 30–31.

Ibid., p. 31.

Parsons, p. 384.

Stanley Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 2.

Joseph Urbas, ‘How Close a Reader of Emerson Is Stanley Cavell?’, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy , 31:4 (2017), 557–574.

Emerson, ‘Nature’, in Collected Works I, pp. 7–45 (p. 10).

Emerson, ‘Circles’, in Collected Works, II, pp. 177–90 (p. 182), quoted in Bluets , p. 94.

Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia , trans. by Shaun Whiteside (London: Penguin, 2005), pp. 201–18 (p. 205).

Bluets , p. 30.

Ibid., pp. 3–4.

Ibid., p. 34.

Jonathan Culler, ‘Apostrophe’, Diacritics , 7:4 (1977), 59–69 (p. 68).

Denis Flannery, ‘Absence, Resistance and Visitable Pasts: David Bowie, Todd Haynes, Henry James’, Continuum , 31:4 (2017), 542–51 (p. 549).

Tom F. Wright, ‘Carlyle, Emerson and the Voiced Essay’, in On Essays: Montaigne to the Present ed. by Thomas Karshan and Kathryn Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 206–22.

Cook, ‘Listening the Lyric Essay’, p. 103.

Bluets , p. 71.

Jacques Lacan, ‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”’, in The Purloined Poe (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), pp. 28–54, p. 48.

Ibid., pp. 32, 39.

A love triangle is also the subject of ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’.

Bluets , p. 46.

Bluets , p. 77.

Ibid., p. 74.

Parsons, p. 385.

Sharon Cameron, ‘Representing Grief: Emerson’s “Experience”’, in Impersonality: Seven Essays (Illinois: Chicago University Press, 2007), pp. 53–78 (p. 53).

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Beyond the True-False Binary: How the Internet Helped Transform the Lyric Essay

Hugh ryan on truth and post-truth in creative nonfiction.

Twenty five years ago, the vast majority of my reading was both bounded and continuous—bounded, because most of my reading material came in discrete packets (a book; a magazine; the salacious graffiti of a seedy bathroom stall), and continuous, because although I might put a book down and come back to it, or have several books going at the same time, I was not generally bouncing back and forth between unrelated reading experiences simultaneously.

Today, I’ve already checked Twitter seven times while writing the sentence above, and now my brain is a whizzing fizz of climate change, K-pop, and “hot” takes in three languages and a hundred voices.

Over the course of the last generation, the Internet has changed our common reading experience; now, as a teacher of creative nonfiction at the Bennington Writing Seminars, I’m seeing first-hand how this new world of reading has transformed the instinctual writing voices of my students. An epochal shift is occurring, and from our great humming mass of distributed machines my students are summoning an unexpected ghost: lyricism.

The lyric essay is having a moment—despite the fact that many of these students could not offer a definition of the lyric essay, describe its techniques, or explain why they used them. But this is to be expected, as this change is not the precious reaching of a precocious undergrad, but an upstream change in the base reagents my students are combining in the alchemical process that is writing. To understand why this is happening, and how to take advantage of it, we need to first step back and define the lyric’s place in the ecosystem of essays. And to really do that , we first have to define what essays themselves are made of.

The Three Components of Essays

All essays have three fundamental components: self, content, and form. The self is the point-of-view of the piece, the storyteller; the selective intelligence of the author, which both chooses the moments that make up the piece and imbues each moment with the unique perspective that best serves the piece’s totality. The content is the thing we are writing about; what Vivian Gornick so masterfully defines as “the situation” (the plot or external object under consideration) and “the story” (the meaning, or internal realizations of the narrator). Finally, form is the shape of the words on the page, how they connect, spiral, or explode.

Think about it this way: all essays are journeys to new knowledge or states of being. The self is the shoulder we the reader are perched on for the journey. The content is the landscape we are traveling through and the path we are on (in Gornick’s terms, the moment-to-moment stuff we see is “the situation,” and our later reflective understanding of the path we took is “the story”). The form is our mode of locomotion, whether we are walking slowly and methodically from start to finish, or leaping wildly from beginning to end and back again.

The Three Kinds of Essays

Building off of this: there are also three main kinds of essay: personal , research , and lyric . All three have self , content , and form , but each kind has a corresponding component that is of dominant importance.

Personal essays are distinguished by their focus on self. The unique point of view of the storyteller is the fundamental reason to read the essay. The content is mostly there to provide a space for the author to think or have experiences, and the reader isn’t meant to learn that content.

Research essays are distinguished by their focus on content. Like journalism, they prize explaining something to the reader; but unlike journalism, the author is directly implicated—they are a part of the group, idea, or experience being explained, and through that explanation, the reader comes to understand the author better, as well as the content.

Finally, lyric essays are distinguished by their focus on form. In these essays, fundamental aspects of meaning are contained in or created by their shape on the page. For example, in lyric essays white space, fragments, repetition, juxtaposition, caesura, braids, changes in tense, and non-linear-organizing structures are frequently used to suggest or change the relationship between the written words and their meaning.

A Rabbit Hole Into the Concept of Truth

The divisions above aren’t arbitrary; they are indicative of a deeper reality about essays. The concept behind creative nonfiction is easy—tell the truth—but the truth, it turns out, is subjective. The three kinds of essay (personal, research, and lyric) are defined as much by their relationship to the truth as they are by how they are written; or perhaps it is more accurate to say that the way they are written is a sotto voce attempt to communicate the author’s understanding of “the truth” as a concept.

How does this work? Well, we can divide all statements into three truth values: true, false, or outside the true-false binary (neither true nor false, both true and false, shifting between true and false, not categorizable as true or false, etc.). In writing, we call these relationships to the truth nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. The different kinds of essays draw both their narrative power and their literary techniques from these pre-existing genres.

Personal essays fall closest to fiction; they are primarily about illustrating the unique point of view of the author. They smooth out the randomness of life to turn it into narrative. The truth exists in the meaning, not the details.

Because the goal of the personal essay is to get the reader to see a certain perspective, they often play fast and loose with the truth (on a small scale). For instance, almost every great personal essayist says that the details are necessary, but they don’t matter. So long as the overall intention is not to deceive the reader, invented detail—in this way of writing—is seen as helping the reader to get at the truth of it all. For example, here’s essayist Jo Ann Beard discussing truth in her book Boys of My Youth :

I remembered the bare bones, and then the rest of it is just constructed from what I know of the people involved. Fuzzy memory doesn’t usually work in an essay; you have to be detailed…the dialogue and various other things were constructed for the pleasure of the reader. And, I must add, the writer… I don’t think anybody could read [BOYS OF MY YOUTH] and think they were reading a factual account of someone’s childhood.

Research essays , on the other hand, double down on nonfiction; they are primarily about explaining some external reality or experience the author has had. The truth in these essays exists in the facts.

Research essays are thus detail oriented. They use a lot of proper names and dates and quotes, and the author can’t make things up without losing my trust as a reader. Atul Gawande, a surgeon turned essayist, is a strong advocate for this kind of truth in nonfiction. In The Guardian in 2014 , an interviewer noted that Gawande felt the “idea of precision” is something writers could learn from doctors. “As a doctor,” he said, “you have to notice the particular shade of blue the patient turns. You need to be very factual.”

Here we have the difference between research and personal essays: Gawande says we have to be very factual, Beard says no one would ever assume her work was factual. (For my money, the best craft essay on this topic is T Kira Madden’s “Against Catharsis: Writing is Not Therapy.”)

Finally, Lyric essays work the techniques of poetry, the area of writing where we rarely ask if something is true or not. Thus, they forefront the idea that truth is in some fundamental way uncertain, unknowable, or uncommunicable, and that life is not at all like a story: it is confusing, conflicting, discontinuous, random, and with multiple or unclear meanings.

Lyric essays tend to be quite subtle, occluded, and difficult, because they often abandon the conventions of normal prose writing. Lyric essays have to teach readers how to understand the rules by which they function, and that can be hard.

In an interview with the journal Sierra Nevada in 2017 , lyric essayist Matthew Komatsu discussed his approach to using lyric juxtapositions to move outside the true-false binary. “[You have] two different ways of viewing it, and I think when you put those two next to each other, if you do it right, there can be a very poetic aspect…where you can essentially represent the different viewpoints, neither being more valid than the other.”

We can see this technique play out in Komatsu’s tender meditation “When We Played.” Originally published in the journal Brevity , it compares his experiences as a kid playing soldier, with his experiences as an adult in the military in Afghanistan. But Komatsu makes this comparison via form, not the written word, and by leaving it thus unspoken, he makes it impossible to analyze in terms of its “truth.”

“When We Played” is composed of short numbered sections. Odd sections are italicized, even ones aren’t. This suggests to the reader some kind of harmony, or braid, that unites all the odd sections and all the even ones. Here is a short excerpt from the beginning:

1. When we played war as boys, we never died. Dead was a reset button, a do-over, a quarrel over who killed who. Maybe we played fair…

2. All those close calls. That time in Afghanistan the SUV drove past the white rocks and into the red ones—white all right, red is dead—a local in the backseat jabbering jib. What did he say? Translator: “He say, WE ARE DRIVING INTO MINEFIELD.”

3. When we played war as men, the wounded on their backs—they called our names, their mothers’ names, the names of all gods past and present…

Komatsu’s form leads us to expect that section three will be a segment about him as a child. When instead we have another adult section, paralleling the sentence structure of section 1, the unexpected juxtaposition suggests an equivalency between the boys and the men—an ineffable comparison built via placement and font. And this brings us back around to the Internet.

The Poetry of Tabs

In many ways, writing on the Internet (not for publication, just regular daily communication) has quietly routinized us to lyric techniques. Lyric essays are often identifiable at a glance, in the same way poetry can be distinguished from prose. Like Komatsu’s essay above, these pieces often move in small segments and employ white space, placement, and font to express ideas. They might repeat a word or phrase to explore multiple meanings from it; or place images, ideas, or phrases next to each other to suggest meaning without putting it into words; or break traditional grammar and sentence structure; or change POV suddenly; or abandon chronological time in favor of some other organizing principle (often alphabetical); or dive back and forth between seemingly unconnected threads; or speak in many voices simultaneously.

Where else do all of these things happen? On Twitter. In the comment section. In discord chats and news aggregators and blogs and the million other online spaces that now make up the vast majority of the quotidian, functional nonfiction we read every day.

But these techniques aren’t just more common because of the Internet, they’re also more useful, because the Internet has pushed us firmly into a post truth world. Deep-fake videos, endless stories of online grifters, and the anonymity of the Internet have tricked or will trick all of us at some point. Moreover: just the constant and routine exposure to other points of view, different stories, and critique from unexpected angles have led us to be suspicious of the Truth (capital T) and our ability to reach it or tell it overall. How does nonfiction function in the hands of writers who aren’t sure the truth exists? Lyrically.

When employed in creative nonfiction (like essay writing), lyric techniques literally complicate the ability of the reader to find truth in the written word: they leave things unsaid and therefore undefinable; they draw multiple, sometimes conflicting, meanings from one word or phrase; they break down sentence structure, embracing verb and tense confusion; they take the story out of linear time, which destroys an easy understanding of causality and motivation, etc.

Thus, the Internet has spent decades teaching my students to read lyric forms, and simultaneously, doubt the truth. It has created (or made visible) a problem—the unknowability of truth—and at the same time, sculpted a language to talk about it. This is not a process that will stop or reverse tomorrow, and I suspect that I will continue to see more lyric techniques in the essays of my students, peers, and friends in years to come. As a writing teacher, I don’t see it as my job to push my students towards one form of truth over another, but it is essential that I understand how the techniques they are using communicate the truth, and why they are reaching for these techniques, right now, instead of more traditional ones.

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Search form, the beautiful, untrue things of the lyric essay.

Oscar Wilde’s most famous critical dialogue, “The Decay of Lying,” begins with a well-meaning but uninformed man named Cyril inviting his male friend Vivian outside: “Don’t coop yourself up all day in the library,” he says. “Let us go and lie on the grass and smoke cigarettes and enjoy Nature.” [1]

Vivian, however, wants nothing to do with Nature, and complains of her “lack of design, her curious crudities, and her extraordinary monotony.” [2]

And thus Vivian and Cyril embark on a grand debate about the role of nature in art, and the problem with what Vivian calls “dull facts,” “depressing truths,” and “careless habits of accuracy.” “There is such a thing as robbing a story of its reality by trying to make it too true,” says Vivian. And “if something cannot be done to check, or at least to modify, our monstrous worship of facts, Art will become sterile, and beauty will pass away from the land.” [3]

Of course, this dialogue is about what Wilde saw as the insufferable realists of nineteenth-century fiction, so what does it have to do with us, a bunch of twenty-first-century essayists?

Vivian, as Wilde’s mouthpiece, gives us the answer near the end of the debate: “Those who do not love Beauty more than Truth,” he says, “never know the inmost shrine of Art.” [4] And in the context of our discussion, it is quite possible that those who do not love beauty more than truth may never know the inmost shrine of the essay.

Put differently, “The Decay of Lying” champions art for art’s sake. Read with an ear for the craft of creative nonfiction, the dialogue has all the workings of a manifesto on the lyric essay—what I might call truth for art’s sake. Consider Wilde’s four basic doctrines:

1. Art never expresses anything but itself.

2. All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature.

3. Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.

4. Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art. [5]

Here, I shall briefly discuss the first and last of Wilde’s statements.

First, art never expresses anything but itself — or, perhaps, for the purposes of our discussion, and with apologies to Wilde, the artist never expresses anything but him- or herself.

In “The Decay of Lying,” Vivian explains the doctrine this way: “Art takes life as part of her rough material, recreates it, and refashions it in fresh forms, is absolutely indifferent to fact, invents, imagines, [and] dreams.” [6] Art may use nature for its building blocks, but the final product is something entirely new, something reflective, not of the world, but of the inner workings of the artist. Consider Basil Hallward, the fictional painter who captured so beautifully the young Dorian Gray in Wilde’s only novel. “Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter,” claims Basil. “The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.” [7] Something similar could be said of the lyric essay—that it relies on the building blocks of memory, meditation, research, speculation, and even narrative, but that in the final product, the essay’s greatest revelation is the essayist. After all, Montaigne’s famous question was not “What do I see?” but “What do I know?” Likewise, Honor Moore calls the prose of the lyric essay a “vehicle of individual emotion,” [8] and D’Agata and Tall have called it a home for “idiosyncratic meditations.” [9] Ultimately what we want from a lyric essay is the interior knowledge of the writer. As Wilde says, “the vision . . . of the artist, is far more important to us than what he looks at.” [10]

Consider the arresting intimacy of Brian Doyle’s eulogistic essay, “Kaddish,” which relies on both structure and content to capture the tragedy of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. [11] The essay consists of 217 one-line descriptions pulled from obituaries of the victims. [12] More than a tribute to the deceased, the essay attempts to re-create the writer’s emotional experience of that day. Each line falls down the page, evoking images of victims falling from the towers, but also giving each victim his or her own moment in time. As we read, we are simultaneously overwhelmed by the sheer number of victims and arrested by the reality of their individual humanity. What’s more, the title, “Kaddish,” tells us this essay is a prayer—not merely a private one, but a recitation, a ritual of sorts. Doyle hasn’t simply reiterated the public mourning of the obituaries, he has created a work of art that gathers and distills the public record and reframes it in a textual structure that reflects that day’s relentless barrage of images, as well as Doyle’s personal, prayerful reaction to the people in those images. It is a record not of what he saw or read, but of what he felt.

Phillip Lopate has registered skepticism about the lyric essay for its “refusal to let thought accrue to some purpose.” [13] But what if that is precisely the point—to capture thought and emotion before it has accrued to some external determination? Oscar Wilde wrote that the “basis of life . . . is simply the desire for expression.” [14] Regardless of any larger social, political, or spiritual implication, the form of the lyric essay is primarily a vehicle for expressing the interiority of the artist. As Wilde scholar Lawrence Danson puts it: “Realists claim that they refer to a world out there; Wilde claims that the only significant out-there begins in here.” [15]

And that brings us to the second of Wilde’s doctrines that I will discuss here, his fourth and final, and for writers of the lyric essay, perhaps most controversial: the doctrine that says, “lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art.”

And before you wonder if I’m going “there” with this presentation, before you divide yourself off in either the D’Agata/Shields/Dornick camp on the left or the Gutkind/Lopate/Levy camp on the right, before we start fighting about truth in nonfiction and the relative fallibility of memory, and that oversimplified claim that all writing is a lie, let me just say that if Oscar Wilde were here to witness such a debate, I like to think he’d rub his hands with delight, and say we were all missing the point.

Ezra Pound said that literature is language charged with meaning. [16] If that is true, then perhaps the essay is truth charged with meaning. But how, you might ask, do we infuse truth with meaning? That is where Oscar Wilde comes in. His warning about “our monstrous worship of facts” is a call for resistance to realism that “finds life crude, and leaves it raw,” and is born of a desire for art that dictates terms to nature, and not the other way around. [17] “Nature is no great mother who has borne us,” writes Wilde. “She is our creation. It is in our brain that she quickens to life.” [18] The meaningfulness that we draw from narrative, that we draw from juxtapositions and associations, that is born of research and speculation, these are the beautiful untrue things that are the proper aim of art—not the mere mimesis of reality, but the generation of new truths out of its building blocks.

As an example of this type of lying at work in the essay, let us reconsider one of the sacred tenets of the genre—that the essay imitates the mind at work. The idea is as old as Montaigne, who wrote, “I chiefly paint my thoughts.” [19] Scott Russell Sanders claims that the essay is “the closest thing we have on paper to a record of the individual mind at work and play.” [20] And as I read the lyric essays of writers such as Eula Biss, Brenda Miller, Ander Monson, and others, and experience the meandering, fragmented, associative playfulness of their work, I see what Montaigne and Sanders mean. And yet, there’s something about this idea that also bespeaks a Wildean Lie.

The venerable Carl Klaus writes, “It’s an alluring idea . . . to affirm . . . that the essay reveals the mind of the essayist.” But Klaus “wonders how one could possibly make such an inference without being privy” to that mind. As he sees it, “the mind’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace.” [21]

If Klaus is right, then the notion that the essay re-creates the mind at work is precisely the kind of beautiful , untrue thing that lends both beauty and truth to a lyric essay. Consider for a moment Wilde’s own evidence for this concept—the French impressionists. “Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets,” asks Wilde. [22]  According to Wilde’s logic, fog didn’t exist until artists gave us a way of seeing it. In other words, the romantic image of a London fog is a lie that art has told us about nature. However, such a lie does not mean that these images are untrue, but merely that such images are a truth about the artist, and not necessarily a truth about the world itself.

Likewise, where—if not from Montaigne, White, Didion, Biss, and others who play in zigzagging, fragmented forms—do we get our wonderful ideas about the associative, reflexive, even lyric way that our minds process information? The essay might show the mind at work, but only because the essay has given us an idea of how to think about our minds in the first place. My true mind is scattershot, it goes off in dead ends, gets stuck on song lyrics, it daydreams, falls asleep, turns on the television and tunes out. My cultivated mind on the page of an essay, in contrast, wants always to be alert to the connectivity of things. As Klaus writes, “Even if one could get inside the head of another human being, I have a hunch that its workings would turn out to be far messier than anything in a personal essay.” [23]

Now, in the first half of this paper, I’ve argued that expressing interiority is the primary role of the lyric essay. But here in the second half I’m arguing against the notion that interiority can be expressed at all, maintaining that such expression is little more than one of Wilde’s beautiful untrue things. But far from negating the first half of my argument, this apparent contradiction proves that the artful life is a necessary part of expressing interiority.

Consider other artful lies of the lyric essay, such as the selective cutting away of reality and superfluous details, or the amplified significance of certain experiences, certain memories, certain people. Or the way a lyric essay might adopt a particular form—a final exam, a series of found postcards, a Google map—and the way such forms generate new ways of seeing that go beyond the seemingly inexorable facts of nature. “Art itself is really a form of exaggeration,” writes Wilde. “And selection, which is the very spirit of art, is nothing more than an intensified mode of over-emphasis.” [24]

Of course, we must not take Wilde’s advice entirely to heart. I’m not sure I would say, as he did in regard to writers of realist fiction: “we have sold our birthright for a mess of facts.” But I might venture that in all the discussion and occasional vitriol about the ethics of information in nonfiction, we may have overlooked the ethics of art and its integral role in helping us render the interior emotional experiences of our lives—those experiences that must be translated to one another if we are to, as Lopate so aptly put it, help each other feel “a little less lonely and freakish.” [25]

So how do we balance our desire to represent real experiences with art’s insistence on the lie? How do we take what nature has given us and move beyond it, not with an arrogant disregard for what actually happened, but with a humble willingness to let the essay uncover what actually matters? After all, if Wilde is right about nature being our creation, then any responsibility we have to nature is first a responsibility to ourselves.

Judith Kitchen put it this way: “The job of the lyric essayist is to find the prosody of fact, finger the emotional instrument, play the intuitive and the intrinsic, but all in service to the music of the real. Even if it’’s an imagined actuality. The aim is to make of not up. The lyre, not the liar.” [26]

Consider what Kitchen is saying here: the heart of the lyric essay is not reality, not nature, but the music of reality, the music of nature as conceived in the mind of the essayist—the music of beautiful untrue things, which, as Wilde says, is the proper aim of art.

[1] Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” in Intentions (Portland, ME: Mosher, 1904), p. 3.

[3] Ibid., p. 9.

[4] Ibid., p. 47.

[5] Ibid., p. 49.

[6] Ibid., p. 20.

[7] Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

[8] Honor Moore, “Origin of the Species,” Seneca Review 37, no. 2 (2007): 102.

[9] John D’Agata and Deborah Tall, “New Terrain: The Lyric Essay,” Seneca Review 27, no. 2 (1997): 3.

[10] Quoted in Paul L. Fortunato, Modernist Aesthetics and Consumer Culture in the Writings of Oscar Wilde (New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 30.

[11] Brian Doyle, Leaping (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2003), pp. 132–40.

[12] Brian Doyle, in email conversation, 14 February 2014.

[13] Phillip Lopate, “A Skeptical Take,” Seneca Review , 37, no. 2 (2007): 31.

[14] Wilde, Intentions , p. 36.

[15] Lawrence Danson, Wilde’s Intentions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 55.

[16] Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 2010), p. 36.

[17] Wilde, Intentions, p. 11.

[18] Ibid., p. 37.

[19] Michel de Montaigne, Essays of Michel de Montaigne.

[20] Scott Russell Sanders, “The Singular First Person,” in Essays on the Essay, ed. Alexander J. Butrym (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989), p. 32.

[21] Carl Klaus, The Made-up Self (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010), p. 20.

[22] Wilde, Intentions, p. 37.

[23] Klaus , Made-up Self , p. 20.

[24] Wilde, Intentions, p. 21.

[25] Phillip Lopate, Art of the Personal Essay (New York: Anchor, 1996), p. xxxii.

[26] Judith Kitchen, “Mending Wall,” Seneca Review 37, no. 2 (2007): 47.

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About the author, joey franklin.

Joey Franklin's essays have appeared in The Writer's Chronicle , The Norton Reader , Gettysburg Review , and elsewhere.  He was the 2011 winner of the Sport Literate essay contest, and his first collection of essays is due out through University of Nebraska Press in 2015. He teaches creative writing and literature at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.

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Lyric essay.

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Lyric essay is a term that some writers of creative nonfiction use to describe a type of creative essay that blends a lyrical, poetic sensibility with intellectual engagement. Although it may include personal elements, it is not a memoir or personal essay, where the primary subject is the writer's own experience. Not all creative essayists have embraced the term, however, which makes it a problematic classification in this community.

Blackburn, Kathleen. “Interview with Lia Purpura.” The Journal 36.4 (Autumn 2012). Web. 2 November 2012. 

Butler, Judith. "Grounding the Lyric Essay." Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction 13.2 (Fall 2011).

D’Agata, John, and Deborah Tall. “The Lyric Essay.” Seneca Review . Web. 5 May 2012. 

Dillon, Brian. “Energy and Rue.” Frieze 151 (November-December 2012). Web. 19 October 2012.

Lazar, David. “Queering the Essay.” Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction. Ed. Margot Singer and Nicole Walker. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Print.

Lopate, Phillip. “Curiouser and Curiouser: The Practice of Nonfiction Today.” The Iowa Review 36.1 (Spring 2006). Web. 29 October 2012.

Lopate, Phillip. “A Skeptical Take.” The Seneca Review 357.2 (Fall 2007). Geneva, NY: Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Print.

Klaus, Carl H. and Stuckey-French, Ned. Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012. Print.

Nelson, Emma. " Review of Small Fires, a Book of Lyric Essays ." Brevity's Nonfiction Blog. 13 April 2012. Web. 10 December 2013.

Emma Nelson describes Julie Marie Wade's book  Small Fires,  a book of lyric essays, using the following language, which is a good example of how lyric essays are usually categorized: "Julie Marie Wade’s   Small Fires  tells a similar story of her own time capsules that, much like the essays themselves, preserve self and childhood memories.  Small Fires , a book of lyric essays, seamlessly incorporates Kantian philosophy, 1980s popular culture, and poetic explorations of words and meanings. Wade’s word choices and descriptions are impeccable, leading her reader on a rhythmic walk through the landscape of life as she explores what we give up to become who we are. Her exquisite language is not limited to word choice, however, but expands to the ways she plays with ordinary words and ideas such as waffle: a breakfast food or a verb “to switch back and forth between possibilities,” she writes, and camouflage as a metaphor for hiding who we are. Wade plays with the ideas, sounds, and feelings of words in a way that only a true poet can, sounding like a woman who not only loves language, but one who knows language well."

In the years since the term “lyric essay” was coined, some creative nonfiction writers have embraced it as a term for the kind of writing they do, while others have rejected it. In 2007, the Seneca Review published a special issue on the lyric essay, in which writers were still at odds about it ten years after the coining of the term, and arguments have continued since then. Some argue that what Tall and D’Agata describe is just essay writing and does not need the descriptor “lyric”; for instance, essayist Lia Purpura states, “I don’t really use the term ‘lyrical essay.’ I really prefer just ‘essay’ to describe what it is I’m up to. The tradition is long and honorable and I don’t feel the need to nichify” (Blackburn). In the Seneca Review special issue, Phillip Lopate praises the idea of the lyric essay for its “replacement of the monaural, imperially ego-confident self” of the traditional personal essay, but questions the lyric essay's lack of argumentative force, or its “refusal to let thought accrue to some purpose” (31). Lopate writes that some lyric essays may be “trying to get a license for their vagueness, which will allow them to dither on prettily, or 'lyrically,' to the frustration of most readers” (32). In short, Lopate is concerned that the lyricism of these essays will not drive intellectual engagement (which he considers to be central to the essay) but will instead become an excuse not to engage fully with issues or arguments.

Others have reacted negatively against the idea of perceiving creative nonfiction as closely related to poetry because poems have been held traditionally to looser standards for factual accuracy than creative nonfiction. In a lyric essay, the “I” persona is cast more as the speaker of a poem, and in poetry, it is understood that this speaker is not always the writer him- or herself and that the speaker may communicate poetic truth instead of factual truth. Brian Dillon, in “Energy and Rue,” criticizes the lyric essay: “If D’Agata’s lyric essay were the best or only hope for the genre today, you’d have to conclude it would be better off defunct” because nonfiction should not depend on a loose, poetic relationship with truth; instead, essayists should be more confident in the tradition of their form as a communication of information through art, not a privileging of art over information. 

The term “lyric essay” emerged as a new name for a type of creative essay in 1997 when the  Seneca Review  began publishing work under this categorization. Associate editors at the time, Deborah Tall and John D’Agata, describe these essays as "‘poetic essays’ or ‘essayistic poems’ [that] give primacy to artfulness over the conveying of information. They forsake narrative line, discursive logic, and the art of persuasion in favor of idiosyncratic meditation. The lyric essay partakes of the poem in its density and shapeliness, its distillation of ideas and musicality of language. It partakes of the essay in its weight, in its overt desire to engage with facts, melding its allegiance to the actual with its passion for imaginative form."

Tall and D’Agata describe the lyric essay as reclaiming the original sense of essay as  essai , attempt, or specifically “attempt at making sense.” Instead of statement, the lyric essay partakes of questions, pursuing an idea but not reaching any conclusion; the reader is meant not to be persuaded or convinced, but to follow the meanderings of the writer’s mind. The rationale behind the lyric essay stems from the claim that “perhaps we're drawn to the lyric now because it seems less possible (and rewarding) to approach the world through the front door, through the myth of objectivity” (Tall and D’Agata). In these essays, there is no objectivity because facts are filtered through the subjective consciousness of the writer, where they may become distorted. Although it does feature subjective consciousness, the lyric essay is not the same as a personal or memoir essay, in that its main purpose is not to narrate the personal experience of the writer. Instead of experience, the lyric essay engages primarily with ideas or inquiries, lending it an aspect of intellectual engagement that is not usually foregrounded in the personal essay. The tension comes when such engagement is blended with a poetic, subjective sensibility.

Laura Tetreault

What Is a Lyric? Definition, Usage, and Literary Examples

Lyric definition.

A  lyric  (lih-RIK) is a type of personal rhythmic  poetry . A lyric  poem  does not contain a  narrative  because its intent is making feelings understood rather than relating events. It is concerned with the often intense or complicated feelings of the speaker (who may or may not be the poet themselves).

The word  lyric  comes from the lyre, an ancient Greek portable harp frequently used by performers. Lyrical poetry was originally meant to be set to music and performed. With the advent of the printing press, performed poetry took a backseat to written works, but since the mid-20th century and the ubiquitous access to popular music, people are as likely to hear a lyric as they are to read it.

Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle categorized all poetry as either lyrical, dramatic, or epic. Where  epic poetry  is meant to represent and appeal to an entire culture, lyric poetry is more personal. Epics are typically told in third-person  omniscient   point of view , while lyrics are almost always in first person. A lyric poem seldom takes up more than a page; an epic can be several books long. Dramatic poetry, meanwhile, is almost a hybrid: it tells a story, but it is driven by emotion.

A Brief History of Lyric Poetry

In ancient Greece, poets performed their work with musical accompaniment, usually in the form of lyres, other stringed instruments, or panpipes. Some of the earliest lyrics poems were compiled by the library of Alexandria, including the work of Sappho. These traditions were also carried on by a few poets in ancient Rome.

The Book of Songs , comprised of works written between 11 and 7 BC in China, contains hymns, eulogies, and even folk songs. These were most likely crafted by uncredited common people writing about their everyday lives. They employed the use of  meter  and focused on subjects like love, loss, work, war, and politics.

As early as the 7th century, the first incarnations of the ghazal, a type of lyric poem composed of  couplets , began to appear in Arabia. Around the 11th century, troubadours started making their way through Europe. As with the ghazal, the troubadours’ lyric works often concerned courtly love. In 12th-century Italy, the poet Petrarch developed the  sonnet , a 14-line poem that Edmund Spencer and  William Shakespeare  would modify and popularize in the 15th century.

The popularity of lyric poetry saw peaks and lulls from that point up to the beginning of the 20th century, when  modernists  like T.S. Elliot and William Carlos Williams began to criticize the genre. In the 1950s and ‘60s, confessional poets like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton brought lyric poetry back into fashion and made it almost a form of activism by discussing sex, mental illness, and other taboo topics.

Types of Lyric Poetry

An elegy is a poetic lamentation, typically beginning with mourning the loss of the narrator’s beloved and moving through the stages of grief. Traditionally, these poems are written in quatrains of  iambic pentameter  with an ABAB  rhyme scheme , but modern poets take different approaches. Alfred Lord Tennyson’s  “In Memoriam A.H.H.”  is an elegy.

There are several types of sonnets, including Shakespearean and Petrarchan, but typically, all sonnets are 14 rhyming lines written in iambic pentameter, and a dramatic turn occurs somewhere in the poem. Shakespeare may be the poet most associated with sonnets due to his impact on the literary world, as well as his prolific collection of sonnets—he wrote more than 150 sonnets.  “Sonnet 18”  is one of his most famous poems in the form.

An  ode  sings the praises of any person, place, or thing the speaker deems worthy of celebration. The tone is classically serious, sincere, and reverent. In Anne Sexton’s “ In Celebration of My Uterus ,” she begins from a place of relief after learning she does not have to undergo a hysterectomy. Sexton celebrates how the doctors who said her womanhood was defective were proved wrong and exalts her general womanness. Some sources consider the ode to be a subgenre of lyric poetry, with forms like the sonnet and the elegy falling under its umbrella.

The ghazal, as mentioned, is one of the first types of lyric poetry. It’s an ancient and complex form composed of couplets, wherein every couplet is a complete expression—nearly poems in their own right. The first line of every ghazal poem is end-stopped—or paused—typically with a punctuation mark. The poet’s name is slipped into the couplet, sometimes surreptitiously and sometimes as an opportunity for the poet to speak to themselves in third person. Many modern-day poets write in this form, among them Agha Shahid Ali, who wrote  “Even the Rain.”

Similar to the ghazal and its complex construction, the  sestina  is a seven- stanza , unrhymed, fixed-verse form with repeated end-words. This French-based poem is often criticized for its strict boundaries, but poets like Ezra Pound—who wrote  “Sestina: Altaforte” —continue to compose in this form.

The villanelle is another repetition-based form, this one with five three-line stanzas and one final four-line stanza. The rhyme scheme for the first three stanzas is ABA, while its final stanza is written in an ABAA scheme.  “One Art”  by Elizabeth Bishop is a villanelle.

A pantoum, which originated in Malaysia, is a poem comprised of a series of interlocking quatrains. The second and fourth lines of one quatrain become the first and third of the next. Unlike a sestina or villanelle, there is no restriction on the length of a pantoum. The rhyme scheme is ABAB. Donald Justice’s  “Pantoum of the Great Depression”  is an example of the form.

Japanese Forms

Some consider the Japanese haiku to be a type of lyric poetry, though these poems are often written in third person and meant to convey a scene—typically one in nature—without any emotion or opinion. Instead of an exploration of a feeling or concept, haiku essentially act as a written snapshot. Aristotle might cast haiku as dramatic poetry instead of lyric.

Meanwhile, the tanka, which shares some elements with haiku, was designed for emotional expression. It often focused on the connection between lovers. One example is Takuboku’s “ Lying On the Dune Sand .”

Dramatic Monologue

This is another contentiously categorized poetic form. Again, Aristotle would call it dramatic, while some scholars consider it a lyric work. As such,  dramatic monologue  seems a category broad enough for both distinctions to apply. Two famous dramatic monologues are Robert Browning’s “ My Last Duchess ” and Silvia Plath’s “ Lady Lazarus .”

The Elements of Lyric Poetry

There are many different aspects that come into play when composing lyric  poetry .

Structural Elements

Rhyme  occurs when two stressed words or syllables share a vowel sound and (when applicable) an ending consonant sound. For example,  love  and  above  rhyme because the stress on  above ’s second syllable shares the same vowel and ending consonant sounds as  love . Rhyme and  rhythm  help words get stuck in the reader or listener’s head, making them useful devices for a poet who’s writing about complex emotions. This ensures the reader or listener will ruminate on the lyric long after they initially experienced it.

Meter  is the way rhythm functions in poetry. It is a system of stressed and unstressed syllables. Metrical feet are individual units of measurement. The metric feet most used in lyric poetry are iambs, trochees, pyrrhic,  anapests , dactyls, and spondees. As pyrrhic feet—two unstressed and short syllables—would be nearly impossible to sustain for even a single line of poetry, their primary use is as substitutions within different types of meter, like iambic pentameter. Similarly, dactyls and spondees are difficult to maintain throughout a poem, as the former was not created with the English language in mind, and the latter would be the poetic equivalent of shouting an entire work.

Performative Elements

When a lyric is part of a performed work like a song, it is often broken up into several repeated sections: verses, choruses, and  refrains . While these can be part of a written poem as well, they are more associated with songs.

A verse is a somewhat uniform but dynamic grouping of lines. Typically, songs have several verses where each one is made up of a different grouping of lines, but every verse in a song will almost always follow the same  rhyme scheme  and rhythm. Choruses are a separate grouping of lines, but they appear several times during the song; choruses are thus a type of refrain. A song’s structure can put these groupings in any order, though most listeners anticipate a verse-refrain-chorus organization.

Literary Elements

Lyrics can make use of multiple literary devices and conventions. The use of any of these devices engages the reader or listener’s sense of imagination as well as cements their connection to the work.

With  metaphors , a writer refers to one thing or person as another, dissimilar thing to help the reader understand a complex or unfamiliar concept. This can be especially useful in lyric poetry, where sometimes the narrator themselves can’t seem to make sense of their feelings. When Alicia Keys sings “This girl is on fire,” she’s not being literal. She is using a metaphor of flames and heat to convey that the subject of her song is a force that can’t be easily stopped.

First-Person Point of View

The events of a narrative told in first-person  point of view  are experienced or witnessed firsthand by the narrator; the personal pronouns used within the story are  I  or  we . The narrator restricts the reader’s understanding of the events because they are limited to the single viewpoint. Thus, the information may not be as reliable as if it were told in third person because the narrator is inherently biased when recounting the events of their story. With lyric poetry’s emphasis on personal feeling, first person makes it easier for the reader or listener to relate to the narrator because their inner monologue is being shared.

Confessional Writing

In this style of writing, the first-person narrator uses the work as a diary of sorts, sharing their deepest fears and hopes, as well as their darkest memories. A writer may take this approach as a means of catharsis or healing, or they make use it to draw in a reader. Just as someone might share a personal secret to cement a friendship, a poet might do the same to gain a reader’s trust.

Dramatic Irony

A character, poet, or lyricist is using  dramatic irony  when they say the opposite of what they really mean, feel, or believe. This device is used to great effect by a poet trying to explain feelings they’re not sure they want to have or deal with.

Song Lyrics as Lyric Poetry

Many people are more familiar with the term  lyric  as it applies to a song rather than with the concept of lyric poetry. Though contemporary song lyrics don’t typically hold to classic poetic forms, much of the same effect on the audience is achieved using many of the same elements and devices.

1. Drake, “Little Bit”

In this remix of a song by singer Lykke Li, R&B artist Drake expounds on the complications of love.

And I will never ever be the first to say it

But still I, they know I

I would do it, push a button

Pull a trigger, climb a mountain

Jump off a cliff ’cause you’re my baby

I love you, love you, a little bit

I would do it, you would say it

You would mean it, we could do it

It was you and I and only I, mmm

The song’s narrator loves “you,” but saying this aloud is difficult for him. He uses metaphors (“pull a trigger,” “climb a mountain”) to express his feelings because he has never been able to say the bare truth. As such, he attempts to temper the impact of the words “I love you” with the qualifier—“a little bit.” This, in a case of dramatic irony, makes the strength of his feelings more evident.

2. Macy Gray, “I Try”

Compared to Drake, Macy Gray’s lyrics are a bit more straightforward—or at least self-aware. She doesn’t understand why, but she recognizes that she can’t bring herself to break ties with “you.”

I try to say goodbye and I choke

I try to walk away and I stumble

Though I try to hide it, it’s clear

My world crumbles when you are not near

The listener understand the narrator’s thought process clearly. But because they are steeped in the narrator’s confusion, they too are unable to make sense of her devotion.

3. Elton John, “The Last Song”

This song, written by John’s close friend and longtime collaborator, Bernie Taupin, was inspired by Freddie Mercury’s 1991 death from complications of AIDS. In the lyrics, Taupin takes on the persona of a gay man dying of AIDS whose father can only now accept his son’s sexuality.

Because I never thought I’d lose

I only thought I’d win

I never dreamed I’d feel

This fire beneath my skin

I can’t believe you love me

I never thought you’d come

I guess I misjudged love

Between a father and his son

The chorus juxtaposes the young man’s conflicted emotions: the anger of being cut down in his youth and the surprise and relief of his father’s presence.

Examples of Lyric Poetry

1. Ocean Vuong,  “Toy Boat”

In this elegy dedicated to Tamir Rice, Ocean Vuong uses strophes of terse lines, none more than four words and some only one. With this technique, he invokes the breathy staccato that affects speech when weeping:

no shores now

to arrive — or

no wind but

this waiting which

2. Randall Mann,  “The Mortician in San Francisco”

This  sestina  eulogizes queer icon Harvey Milk through the lens of Mann’s own sexuality. He uses  queer ,  hands ,  White ,  Milk ,  years , and  shot  as the repeated end-words, adopting the persona of the mortician who worked on Milk’s assassin—who was also a gay man.

This may sound queer,

but in 1985 I held the delicate hands

of Dan White:

I prepared him for burial; by then, Harvey Milk

was made monument—no, myth—by the years

since he was shot.

3. Margaret Walker,  “Love Song for Alex, 1979”

This sonnet has the characteristic turn, signaled by the word  but , where the first-person narrator recognizes that she and the unnamed loved one are bound together indefinitely.

but all my days of Happiness and wonder

are cradled in his arms and eyes entire.

They carry us under the waters of the world

out past the starposts of a distant planet

And creeping through the seaweed of the ocean

they tangle us with ropes and yarn of memories

where we have been together, you and I.

4. Sappho, Fragment 31

Because only one full poem of Sappho’s survived the Alexandria Library fire, her other works exist only in fragments today. Sappho’s style often uses  enjambment —when a thought spills over from one line to another without punctuation. Here, it works to convey someone fawning over someone else.

and my tongue stiffens into silence, thin

flames underneath my skin prickle and spark,

a rush of blood booms in my ears, and then

my eyes go dark,

and sweat pours coldly over me, and all

my body shakes, suddenly sallower

than summer grass, and death, I fear and feel,

is very near.

Sappho uses metaphor to describe the strangely invigorating discomfort that her attraction inspires: it’s so strange and unfamiliar that it invokes visions of her own death. These are complex and extremely personal emotions to explore, which is a staple of lyric poetry.

Further Resources on Lyric Poetry

Contemporary poets breathe new life into an ancient form in the journal  Contemporary Ghazals .

Encyclopedia.com  offers a thorough exploration of the history of the lyric poem.

Jacket2  offers commentary on lyric poetry’s place in the poetry world today.

Related Terms

• Narrative Poem

When I first started reading and writing creative nonfiction , I was particularly struck by the “braided essay”—its poeticism, its interlacing movements, its endless possibilities. The beauty of a braid lies in the way it weaves distinct strands into a coherent whole, the way individual strands intermittently appear and disappear.

If you’ve ever felt like your essay was missing something or needed more texture, or if you’re someone who loves miscellany, a braided essay might be right for you. But before I wax eloquent about the braided essay:

What is a braided essay?

A braid is a structure commonly used in the genre of creative nonfiction, though it can easily be adapted for use in other genres. Richard Powers’ The Overstory and Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 are great examples of novels that use braiding as a structure.

Simply put, a braided essay is one that weaves two or more distinct “threads” into a single essay. A thread can be a story with a plot or simply a string of thought about a specific topic.

A braided essay is one that weaves two or more distinct “threads” into a single essay. A thread can be a story with a plot or simply a string of thought about a specific topic.

If all of this sounds abstract and complicated, don’t fret: the good news is that a braided essay is much easier to understand in practice than in theory. Consider, for instance, Roxane Gay’s “ What We Hunger For ,” which consists of two threads. In thread A, Gay writes about The Hunger Games and the representation of female strength in pop culture. In thread B, she recounts memories of her childhood as a girl. Gay breaks up these two threads into smaller fragments, then alternates fragments from thread A with those from thread B.

This alternating movement draws out themes and ideas from each thread, such that the essay as a whole points to larger ideas and themes.

This alternating movement draws out themes and ideas from each thread, such that the essay as a whole points to larger ideas and themes. In the case of “What We Hunger For,” the result of braiding is an essay that combines The Hunger Games and the writer’s personal experiences to gesture to the themes of strength, trauma, storytelling, the power of reading, and hope for healing. This happens often in braided essay: the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

What counts as a “thread?”

For something to count as a “thread,” it has to be sufficiently distinct in terms of style and/ or content. To braid these threads together, break each into fragments, then alternate a fragment from one braid with a fragment from another braid. Check out the following diagram to see how this works:

How to braid threads in a braided essay

To help your reader distinguish one thread from another, writers often add a visual break between fragments from different threads. This usually means inserting either an additional section break or an asterisk between fragments.

In addition, while there are no maximum number of threads you can include in an essay, an essay with too many threads can get out of hand really quickly!

What makes a braided essay coherent?

Distinct threads often speak to one thing (or a few things) that unifies the essay. In Maggie Nelson’s Bluets , it is the narrator’s love of blue—established in the very beginning of the book-length essay—that provides coherence to the many threads in the essay, which range from philosophy to personal suffering, vision to pain. In other essays, what unifies the threads becomes apparent only as the essay develops; the pleasure of reading such essays comes from seeing how disparate threads gradually come together. A good example is “ Time and Distance Overcome ” by Eula Biss, which begins as an essay about the history of telephone poles and develops into a meditation on race. Another wonderful example by Biss is “Babylon,” which can be found in her book Notes from No Man’s Land .

The best braided essays, however, unfold associatively, even ambiguously.

The best braided essays, however, unfold associatively, even ambiguously. While coherence is important, making the links between the various threads too neat or too obvious can make an essay feel contrived and boring. When writing a braided essay, it’s always good to remember: your reader is often smarter than you think!

Before we explore how to write a braided essay, let’s look more closely at braided essay examples for inspiration.

Braided essay examples

• Rebecca Solnit’s “The Blue of Distance” is a classic braided essay that weaves the narrator’s meditations on the color blue in 15th century paintings and her personal reflections on distance, memory, and longing. This unlikely pairing plunges the reader into a poetic, blue-hued aura, inviting us to contemplate our own relationships with distance and longing. “The Blue of Distance” can be found in A Field Guide to Getting Lost alongside two more essays of the same name.
• In “ The Empathy Exams ,” Leslie Jamison draws on events in her personal life and her experiences working as a medical actor to craft a moving meditation on the concept of empathy. This essay also uses the form of a hermit crab essay (for more on hermit crabs, check out #9 in this article) with deftness and to great emotional effect. This essay can also be found in Jamison’s book, The Empathy Exams .
• Annie Dillard’s “An Expedition to the Pole” is a fascinating braided essay that interlaces the narrator’s religious experiences in church with reportage on famous polar expeditions. While this essay is rather long, the ending – in which the two separate threads fuse into one – makes it entirely worth it. “An Expedition to the Pole,” which opened up my ideas of what’s possible in a braided essay, can be found in Dillard’s essay collection, Teaching a Stone to Talk .
• In “Reality TV Me,” Jia Tolentino’s reflection on her time as a contestant on a reality tv show is intercut with short, ekphrastic descriptions of various scenes from the show. The result is a fun yet compelling meditation on the concepts of reality and performance. This essay can be found in Tolentino’s essay collection, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion .
• Braiding Sweetgrass offers, in the words of its author Robin Wall Kimmerer, “a braid of stories” about nature “woven from three stands: indigenous ways of knowing, scientific knowledge, and the story of an Anishinaabekwe scientist trying to bring them together in service to what matters most.” Expect to be delighted, jolted, and awed by this brilliant book.
• Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors is a miscellany of thoughts on motherhood, children’s literature, and great women writers. Enchanting and entirely unique, Little Labors is a great braided essay example in book form.
• In A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause , Shawn Wen paints a portrait of the mime Marcel Marceau with a varied collection of materials. At times cutting and moving, this innovative essay is a must-read.

Inspired yet? Follow this step-by-step guide on how to write a braided essay to write your own!

How to write a braided essay

The writing process, by definition, requires many rounds of drafting and revision. For a more general step-by-step guide to writing essays, check out the guides in these articles on writing lyric essays , narrative essays , and memoirs .

1. Get inspired and generate ideas

The best way to learn how to write a braided essay is to read one, and to get an idea of what’s possible. Next, begin making a list of ideas for your essay. If you’re in need of writing prompts, check out our Facebook group !

2. Do a freewrite

Once you’ve chosen one idea, explore its possibilities by doing a freewrite. While freewriting, be sure to keep your pen moving – don’t even stop to correct any grammatical or spelling mistakes! The point of a freewrite is to keep the ideas flowing until you arrive at an idea that feels right. In the words of Peter Elbow, who developed the freewriting strategy, “The consequence [of writing] is that you must start by writing the wrong meanings in the wrong words; but keep writing until you get to the right meanings in the right words. Only in the end will you know what you are saying.” In my personal experience, it often takes at least 10-15 minutes for a freewrite to yield the ideas that feel right.

3. Read your freewrite

As you read what you’ve just written, highlight important themes, ideas, words, and/or motifs. Rely on your intuition in this process. Of these, identify the core of the essay you’d like to write. This is the primary thread of your essay.

4. Begin writing your primary thread

Rather than starting from “the beginning,” however, begin with the thing that resonates most with you. Doing so not only helps you to maintain momentum in the writing process, but also provides an anchor for your writing. Because braided essays are so associative, it can be easy to lose track of what feels right in the process of writing.

5. Start on your other thread(s)

It is often much easier to build a braided essay when you do it bit by bit, rather than thread by thread. The reason is that, with a braided essay, development in one braid often affects another. It’s much easier to develop one thread alongside another. This also makes the final produce much more organic.

6. Read what you have so far

Now that you have written the beginnings of several threads, read what you have and notice how your essay has already morphed. Doing these regular “check-ins” with your braided essay can help you to stay on top of how it is developing. If not, a braided essay can get unruly very quickly!

7. Continue writing

If you’re not sure how to continue, do research. This can be any form of research – from interviews to googling, immersive to archival. As you do research, keep an eye out for opportunities for expansion. Ask yourself: what new associations emerge?

8. Repeat steps 4-7 until satisfied.

Good writing is often built section by section, rather than produced in one burst. As you read what you have written so far, note places to expand and places to cut.

Once you’re satisfied with your braided essay, begin paying attention to the finer things: word choice, sentence structure, figurative words. Revising and editing are key to making your braided essay work. If you’re looking for a fresh pair of eyes to look at your writing, check out our schedule of nonfiction workshops !

Writing a braided essay for the first time can be challenging, but remember to have fun in the process. If you’d like to learn about other forms of creative nonfiction, check out this article !

Write the best braided essays at Writers.com

What will your braided essay be about? Perhaps you’ll combine the most seemingly unrelated topics: your marriage with the history of paleontology; your time in high school with musings on the color orange; the anatomy of an orca with your favorite jacket.

Whatever the braids, write the best braided essays at Writers.com, where you’ll receive expert feedback on the essays you write. Find inspiration in our upcoming creative nonfiction courses , and forge new relationships between seemingly-unalike things.

I have written a braided essay (although I did not know it by this name until reading this post) of approximately 11,000 words. Too long for a short-story; too short for standard creative nonfiction.

Where does one publish a braided essay of intermediate length?

Hi Kathleen,

Good question! I don’t know of any journals off the bat that accept essays of that length–generally, the upper limit will range between 3,000 and 7,500 words. Nonetheless, you might find a good home for your essay at this article: https://writers.com/best-places-submit-creative-nonfiction-online

Best of luck!

Hi Kathleen, This is such a great explanation of the Braided Essay and these examples are amazing. I just bought ‘A Twenty Minute Silence’– thank you for introducing me to this text.

Question: I teach Creative Writing and my students love these Lyric Essay forms, but one student noted, ‘It seems like most collage and braided essays are about serious subjects: loss, heartbreak, grief, abuse, etc. Are there any funny collage or braided essays?’

I thought surely there must be but scanning Brevity and other online journals I could not come across a single ‘funny’ collage or braided essay. There are numerous funny Hermit Crab Essays but do you know of any funny/humorous Braided or Collage Essays?

I can also be reached at [email protected] (should you want to respond or have a response).

Sorry for the long comment here. Really enjoyed reading this! Thanks again.

I’m working on a braided essay for my class at the moment and its about mud and magic. Not a funny story but a fun story about childhood and imagination.

Have you looked up David Sedaris (Santaland Diaries) or Dave Barry? Off the top of my head, I’m sure they’d have something!

[…] writing styles, and this one is called a braided or woven essay. A braided essay is where you take two seemingly dissimilar topics and weave them together into one. In this case, I describe the physical and psychological strength my adoptive mother required to […]

I’m writing my memoir and can see a few threads that I could use for the braided structure, Does braiding work just as well for a book (80,000 words) as for an essay?

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How to Include Song Lyrics in an Essay and Properly Quote Them

Song lyrics can add depth and meaning to an essay, whether you are analyzing a piece of music, exploring the themes of a song, or discussing the influence of a particular artist. However, it’s important to properly quote song lyrics to give credit to the original artist and comply with copyright laws. This step-by-step guide will show you how to quote song lyrics in your essay in a way that is both effective and legal.

Firstly, it’s important to choose an appropriate lyric that aligns with the topic of your essay. Make sure the lyric enhances your argument or supports the points you are trying to make. Once you have selected the lyric, enclose it in quotation marks. For example, if you are writing about the power of love, you might choose the lyric: “What’s love got to do, got to do with it?”

Next, indicate the artist’s name and the song title. This helps your reader identify the source of the lyric and gives credit to the original artist. You can use the em or strong tags to emphasize the artist’s name and song title. For example, you could write: According to Tina Turner in her song “ What’s Love Got to Do with It ?”.

If you are quoting multiple lines of a song, consider using the

tag to set the lyrics apart from the rest of your essay. This helps to distinguish the lyrics and makes them stand out to your reader. Additionally, it’s important to include the line breaks and punctuation as they appear in the song. This preserves the original formatting and ensures accuracy. For example, you could write: “What’s love got to do, got to do with it? What’s love but a second-hand emotion?” – Tina Turner, “ What’s Love Got to Do with It ?”

Remember, when quoting song lyrics, always give credit to the artist and song title, and make sure to follow proper formatting and punctuation. By properly quoting song lyrics, you can enhance your essay and give your reader a greater understanding of your analysis and interpretation.

Table of Contents

Understand the Copyright Laws

When quoting a song lyric in your essay, it is important to understand and adhere to the copyright laws to avoid any legal issues. Copyright laws protect the rights of the original creators of a work, including song lyrics. Here are some key points to keep in mind:

• Fair Use: Fair use is a legal doctrine that allows limited use of copyrighted material without permission from the rights holder. However, it is important to understand that the definition of fair use can vary depending on the purpose and nature of the use, the amount of the quote, and the effect on the market for the original work.
• Public Domain: Song lyrics may be in the public domain if the copyright term has expired or if the lyrics were never protected by copyright. It is important to check the copyright status of the song before including lyrics in your essay.
• Attribution: When quoting a song lyric, it is important to give proper attribution to the original artist. This includes mentioning the artist’s name and the song title. If possible, include additional information such as the album or release date.
• Obtaining Permission: In some cases, it may be necessary to obtain permission from the rights holder to quote a song lyric. This is particularly true if you plan to use a substantial portion of the lyrics or if you intend to use the lyrics for commercial purposes. Contact the rights holder or their authorized representative to obtain permission.

It is important to note that this guide does not provide legal advice. If you have specific questions or concerns about copyright laws, it is recommended to consult with a legal professional.

Choose a Relevant Song Lyric

When it comes to selecting a song lyric to quote in your essay, it is important to choose a relevant and meaningful line that adds value to your argument or enhances the overall message of your essay. Here are some steps to help you choose a fitting song lyric:

• Consider your essay topic: Think about the main theme or message of your essay. Are you discussing love, identity, or social justice? Select a song lyric that relates to your topic and helps reinforce your argument.
• Identify key words or phrases: Look for words or phrases in the song lyrics that align with your essay topic. These can be powerful metaphors, descriptive language, or emotional expressions that resonate with your readers.
• Research the song: Do some background research on the song and artist to gain a deeper understanding of the meaning behind the lyrics. This will help ensure that your chosen lyric fits well within the context of your essay.
• Avoid clichés: While popular song lyrics can be impactful, it is best to avoid overly clichéd lines that have been quoted extensively in other works. Choose a lyric that is unique, thought-provoking, and adds a fresh perspective to your essay.

By following these steps, you will be able to choose a relevant song lyric that complements your essay and engages your readers. Remember to properly cite the lyric according to the citation style guidelines provided by your instructor or institution.

Decide on the Quotation Style

After selecting the song lyric you want to quote in your essay, it is important to decide on the appropriate quotation style to use. The style you choose will depend on the citation format and guidelines specified by your instructor or the publication you are writing for.

There are various citation styles commonly used, including MLA (Modern Language Association), APA (American Psychological Association), and Chicago/Turabian. Each style has its own set of rules and guidelines for citing sources, including song lyrics.

1. MLA Style:

If you are using MLA style, the general rule for citing song lyrics is to enclose them in quotation marks and provide the artist’s name, the song title in italicized format, the album name (if applicable), the version or recording label (if necessary), and the release year. For example:

“I’m just a soul whose intentions are good” (Buffalo Springfield).

2. APA Style:

When using APA style, song lyrics should be presented in quotation marks and the artist’s name, the song title in italicized format, the album name (if applicable), the version or recording label (if necessary), and the release year should be provided. For example:

“I’m just a soul whose intentions are good” (Buffalo Springfield, 1966).

3. Chicago/Turabian Style:

If you are using Chicago/Turabian style, song lyrics are cited using an endnote or footnote. In the note, the artist’s name, the song title in italicized format, the album name (if applicable), the version or recording label (if necessary), and the release year should be included. For example:

1. Buffalo Springfield, “For What It’s Worth,” album title, version or recording label, 1966.

It is important to consult the specific guidelines of the citation style you are using to ensure that you provide all the necessary information and format the citation correctly. Additionally, if you are using lyrics from a song that is not well-known or easily accessible, you may need to provide additional information, such as the songwriter’s name or the URL of the song lyrics website.

Integrate the Song Lyric into Your Essay

Once you have selected a relevant song lyric to quote in your essay, it is important to integrate it smoothly into the rest of your writing. This ensures that the quote feels organic and flows seamlessly within your essay.

Here are some tips for properly integrating a song lyric into your essay:

• Provide context: Before quoting the song lyric, provide some context to your reader. Explain why you have chosen this specific lyric and how it relates to your essay topic or argument.
• Use quotation marks: Enclose the song lyric in quotation marks to indicate that it is someone else’s words. This helps to distinguish it from your own writing.
• Cite the source: After the quoted lyric, include the artist’s name, the song title, and the album or year of release in parentheses. This gives credit to the original creator and allows your readers to find the source if they are interested.
• Explain the significance: After quoting the lyric, explain its significance within the context of your essay. Discuss how it supports your argument or contributes to the overall theme of your writing.
• Provide analysis: Analyze the song lyric and discuss its meaning or impact. Consider the lyrics’ symbolism, imagery, or literary devices used. This demonstrates a deeper understanding of the song and its message.
• Connect to the broader discussion: Relate the quoted lyric back to your thesis or the main points of your essay. Show how it adds value to the larger topic and contributes to the overall discussion.

By following these steps, you can seamlessly integrate a song lyric into your essay. Remember to maintain a balance between quoting and analyzing, and ensure that the song lyric enhances your argument or provides valuable insight to your readers.

Use Quotation Marks and Citations

When quoting a song lyric in your essay, it is important to use quotation marks and provide proper citations to give credit to the original artist and songwriter.

Here are the steps to follow:

• Place the lyric in quotation marks: Start by enclosing the song lyric you are quoting in double quotation marks. For example, if you are quoting the line “I will always love you” from the song “I Will Always Love You” by Whitney Houston, write it as: “I will always love you”.
• Indicate the song title: After the lyric, include the title of the song in italics. For example: “I will always love you” (italicized).
• Note the artist: Next, mention the name of the artist or band who performed the song. In our example, it would be Whitney Houston.
• Provide the album’s name (optional): If relevant, you can also include the name of the album the song appears on. For example, if “I Will Always Love You” is from the album “The Bodyguard Soundtrack”, you can mention it.
• Add the year of release (optional): If you want to provide additional information, you can include the year the song was released. For instance, if “I Will Always Love You” was released in 1992, you can mention it as well.

Here is an example of how a properly quoted song lyric in an essay would look:

Remember, using quotation marks and providing proper citations not only shows respect for the original artist, but it also helps avoid plagiarism and gives readers the necessary information to locate the song.

Provide Context for the Song Lyric

When including a song lyric in your essay, it’s important to provide context so that the reader understands the significance of the lyric and its connection to your argument or analysis. Contextualizing the song lyric can help support your points and make your essay more cohesive. Here are a few ways to provide context for the song lyric:

• Introduce the song: Begin by briefly introducing the song that the lyric is from. Mention the title of the song and the name of the artist or band. This provides basic information for the reader and also helps them locate the song if they are interested in listening to it.
• Explain the meaning: Provide a brief explanation of the meaning behind the song or the message it conveys. This can help the reader better understand the lyric in its intended context.
• Discuss the relevance: Explain why the song lyric is relevant to your essay topic or argument. Connect it to the broader themes or ideas you are exploring and explain how the lyric supports or enhances your point.
• Provide historical context: If the song lyric is from a particular time period or is associated with a social or cultural movement, provide some background information to give the reader a better understanding of the historical context of the lyric.
• Use quotations or excerpts: Include a short excerpt of the song lyrics to give the reader a sense of the words and their impact. Enclose the lyric in quotation marks and provide a citation to give credit to the artist and the song.

By providing context for the song lyric, you not only ensure that the reader understands its significance but also enhance the overall quality of your essay. Context can help you effectively incorporate the song lyric into your analysis and make your arguments more persuasive and compelling.

Analyze the Song Lyric in Relation to Your Essay

Once you have properly quoted the song lyric in your essay, it’s important to analyze it in relation to the topic and purpose of your essay. By doing so, you can provide a deeper insight and understanding of the lyric for your readers.

Here are some steps to help you analyze the song lyric:

• Explain the meaning: Start by explaining the meaning of the song lyric in your own words. Consider the overall theme and message conveyed by the lyric. Is it about love, heartbreak, social issues, or personal experiences?
• Explore the emotions: Discuss the emotions evoked by the song lyric. How does the lyric make you feel? Does it convey joy, sadness, anger, or any other powerful emotions? Explain why the lyric has such an impact on you and its relevance to your essay.
• Analyze the language: Analyze the language used in the song lyric. Look for any poetic devices, such as metaphors, similes, personification, or symbolism. Discuss how these devices contribute to the overall meaning and effectiveness of the lyric.
• Consider the context: Consider the context in which the song lyric was written. Look into the artist’s background, the music genre, and the time period. Understanding the context can provide valuable insights into the meaning and intention behind the lyric.
• Relate it to your essay: Finally, relate the song lyric to the main theme or argument of your essay. Explain how the lyric enhances your understanding of the topic and supports your overall analysis. Use the lyric as a supporting example or evidence to strengthen your points.

Analyzing the song lyric in relation to your essay not only adds depth to your writing but also demonstrates your critical thinking skills. It allows your readers to see the connection between the song and your essay, creating a cohesive and well-supported piece of writing.

Conclude with a Personal Interpretation

In conclusion, including a personal interpretation of the song lyric in your essay can provide a unique perspective and enhance the overall analysis. This final section allows you to express your own thoughts and feelings about the lyric and its significance. Here are a few steps to help you effectively conclude your essay with a personal interpretation:

• Reflect on the meaning of the lyric: Take some time to think about the message and emotions conveyed by the song lyric. Consider how it relates to your own experiences and beliefs.
• Analyze the impact of the lyric: Evaluate the effect that the lyric has on the overall song and its intended audience. Think about the themes and ideas it explores and how they resonate with you.
• Offer your personal perspective: Share your own interpretation of the lyric and explain why it resonates with you. Discuss any personal connections or experiences that relate to the theme or message of the song.
• Provide supporting evidence: Back up your personal interpretation with examples from the lyric itself or other relevant sources. Cite specific lines or phrases that support your viewpoint.

Ultimately, the personal interpretation section should bring together your analysis and reflection on the song lyric, allowing you to express your own thoughts and emotions. Keep in mind that this section should not dominate the essay but rather serve as a meaningful conclusion to your analysis.

Question and answer:

What is the correct way to quote a song lyric in an essay.

The correct way to quote a song lyric in an essay is to use quotation marks around the entire lyric line and include the songwriter’s name, the song title, and the album or source where the song can be found.

Can I use a song lyric as the title of my essay?

It is generally not recommended to use a song lyric as the title of your essay, as it may give the impression that your essay is primarily focused on the song itself rather than the broader topic you are writing about.

What if I want to include a longer excerpt from a song in my essay?

If you want to include a longer excerpt from a song in your essay, you can format it as a block quotation by indenting the entire excerpt on both sides and using a smaller font size. However, it is important to only include longer excerpts if they are directly relevant and contribute to the overall point or argument of your essay.

Do I need to provide the songwriter’s name and the album for every song lyric I quote in my essay?

Yes, it is important to provide the songwriter’s name and the album or source where the song can be found for every song lyric you quote in your essay. This helps give proper credit to the songwriter and allows your readers to easily locate the song if they are interested.

Can I alter or modify song lyrics when quoting them in my essay?

When quoting song lyrics in your essay, it is generally recommended to preserve the original wording and not alter or modify the lyrics. However, if you need to make slight changes for grammatical or stylistic reasons, you can use square brackets [ ] to indicate any modifications you have made.

What if I don’t know the songwriter’s name or the album of the song?

If you are unsure of the songwriter’s name or the album of the song you are quoting, you can do some research to try and find this information. If you are unable to find the specific details, you can mention this in your essay or use a generic reference such as “unknown songwriter” or “unreleased song” to acknowledge the lack of information.

Can I use song lyrics as evidence or support for my arguments in an essay?

Yes, you can use song lyrics as evidence or support for your arguments in an essay, as long as they are relevant to your topic and help strengthen your points. However, it is important to provide proper analysis and interpretation of the lyrics to explain how they contribute to your argument.

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A companion to Greek lyric

Veronika lütkenhaus , ludwig-maximilians-universität münchen. [email protected].

[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]

This voluminous companion has a dual purpose. Firstly, it serves as a guide for those new to the field, providing a comprehensive overview of the contexts, themes, and techniques involved in dealing with ancient Greek lyric, particularly given its fragmentary state. Secondly, it presents the current state of research and the recently expanded range of methodological approaches to these texts. After abbreviations, author biographies, and the preface, the main part consists of four well-organised sections, comprising a total of 35 chapters written by renowned experts in their respective fields. A ‘further reading’ section in each chapter, a thorough overall bibliography, and a useful index complete the volume.

Section 1: Contexts

The first section lays the groundwork for entering into the archaic Greek mindset and contexts of lyric production. Athanassaki deals with the ‘business’ of lyric choruses and public performance practice; her depictions of the roles of choreuts and chorodidaskaloi are illuminating, especially the twofold position of the chorodidaskalos towards the chorus (p. 12f. and 17): the chorodidaskalos actively leads the chorus as ‘pupils’ in singing the inspired poetry while passively led by it as a ‘Muse’ to new poetic inspiration. [1] Furley then examines the interplay of the abstract literary artistry of lyric prayers and an actual living belief in the gods. The interesting relationship and mutual enrichment of the two main poetic genres of the time, epic and lyric, is then expounded by Kelly. He points out commonalities and differences and elucidates the subtleties of their sometimes blurry genre boundaries, giving examples such as Stesichorus’ extensive epic songs. This is followed by the broad field of poetry related to athletic competition, and its significance for social advancement and prestige (Nicholson); the realm of symposia as crucial locations for lyric performance, and the query of how accurately phrases such as ‘aristocracy’ depict sections of ancient society (Węcowski); and last the political circumstances and social upheavals between individuals and rising institutions, tyrannies and emerging democracies (Hall).

Section 2: Methodologies and Techniques

As stated in the preface, some of these technical essays require more prior knowledge of Greek than most of the other chapters. For students unfamiliar with papyrology, Sampson offers an ideal, ‘demystifying’ (91) introduction: structured, illuminating, and up-to-date on digital resources. The images of papyri, ample exemplary transcripts, and the final paragraph on ‘papyrological ethics’ are particularly noteworthy. Phillips elucidates the indirect transmission of lyric through citation and scholia, especially in Pindar’s case. D’Angour then provides a clear overview of lyric meter (first in general, then archaic, then classic meter), garnished with enjoyable mnemonics. The ‘Lyric Dialects’ chapter by de Kreij covers the language of all nine canonical lyricists one by one, each with a concise list of general features followed by the respective poet’s particular phonology and morphology, presented in bullet points with numerous examples.

The remaining chapters of this section move away from the hands-on technical equipment into the field of (new) theoretical constructs underlying the interpretation of lyric, such as pragmatics (deixis: van Emde Boas) and, exemplified by Sappho fr. 2 (inviting Aphrodite into her enchanting locus amoenus ), and the ‘spatial turn’ (Giesecke), which opens up a new ‘space’ for lively hypotheses and creative contemporary viewpoints but whose benefit for the understanding of the poem’s inherent information and layers of meaning will be judged divergently.

Montgomery Griffiths’ essay brings an element of surprise to this volume. Being an intriguing and profoundly personal report of her own production and performance of a Sappho piece, it seems a bit out of place in the otherwise sober and impartial section on methods and techniques. As a postmodern example of artistic treatment of an ancient subject, it would make a suitable closing chapter of the ‘Receptions’ section.

Section 3: Authors and Forms

Of the fourteen essays, three deal with lyric sub-genres (iambos, elegy, and dramatic lyric); nine on individual poets; one concentrates on the phenomenon of Athenian ‘New Music’ in the late 5 th and early 4 th century, and one on the later development in Hellenistic poetry. The chapters on Iambos (Lennartz) and Elegy (Bartol) present the characteristics, contexts, and historical development; in addition, they introduce several significant representatives of these genres. The following nine chapters on particular poets almost correspond to the Greek lyric canon, but Ibycus and Anacreon are treated together in one essay (Cingano) and leave room for two more: Solon and Theognis (Bowie).

The chapters on ‘New Music’ and ‘Dramatic Lyric’ are notable. LeVen discusses identifiable rhythmical, stylistic and other innovations of the ‘New Music’ period in Athens and provides an antenna for the nuances of their ancient perception and evaluation. She succeeds in grasping these vague and hardly classifiable phenomena and their complex socio-political implications. Swift further broadens the generic exploration area of Greek lyric: she promotes the highly elaborate (choral and later monodic) lyric parts of drama, inviting readers to read them ‘not only as drama, but also as song’ (388). Surely these passages should not be altogether wrested from their contexts, and the ancient readers and scholars who formed the canon of Greek lyric poets would probably not have thought of inserting full-blooded dramatists, but neither does the modern compartmentalization of research areas always do full justice to the texts. In addition to the kinship in vocabulary, imagery, and meter, the interaction of some choral passages with ‘pure’ lyric poetry can prove their close affinity. For instance, the strong reception of Anacreon in the second stasimon of Euripides’ Cyclops , called ‘ Anacreontea avant la lettre’ by Peter Bing, [2] could be another illustrative argument in favour of Swift’s point.

Morrison closes the section with a prospect of later lyric production and its preceding and underlying transformative processes: the character of Hellenistic poetry compared to the archaic era, the changed circumstances, styles, and focuses, the influence of a growing book culture and rising scholarship. His essay constitutes a fitting point of connection with the ‘Receptions’ section.

Section 4: Receptions

This varied final section covers a broad range of areas and ways of reception. It goes from the ancient Roman imitatio and aemulatio [3] to German Pindar during the periods of the reformation, neoclassicism and beyond: Hamilton (447) quotes from Goethe’s passionate 1772 letter to Herder ‘Ich wohne jetzt in Pindar’ (one recalls Montgomery Griffiths’ Sappho). It further ranges from the American Anacreon (Rosenmeyer on the US National Anthem) to Simonides, Alcman, Sappho in Scotland (Allan); and from the feminist movement of the past and current century and the case of Anne Carson (Johnson and Silverblank) to translation theory in Brazil. Some exemplary chapters will be presented in more detail here.

Zanker explores the appropriation of Greek lyric in Horace under the three headlines of (I) ‘adjustment of Greek meters’ (less metrical variation in Horace’s Sapphic and Alcaic stanza), (II) the iambic and the lyric side of reception, and (III) the technique of ‘blending’ several threads into one. In Part II, Zanker gives the most common and obvious examples of Horatian imitatio , including the well-established theory of first motto verses. Part III shows how Horace blends (1) Greek with Roman culture and contexts; (2) the archaic with the Hellenistic lyric tradition (whose influence was formerly underestimated) ‒ one should add here Feeney’s most illuminative coinage of an archaic-Hellenistic ‘twin inheritance’; [4] (3) the genre blending, plausibly illustrated by means of the category theory (421). Epodes 11, 13 and 14 are mentioned as prime examples of audacious genre blending (lyric-elegiac content in a quintessentially iambic book); Epode 14 could be even more exploited for genre blend by pointing to the lyricist par excellence Anacreon (l. 9‒12), whose poetic production is best known for wine and love but encompasses harsh iambics, too. Horace’s probably conscious reception of the oldest Anacreontea alongside Anacreon would be another tangible example of Hellenistic and archaic blending.

Allendorf deals with the reception before and after Augustan poetry. His discussion of various Sappho 31 receptions and reminiscences (Catullus, Valerius Aedituus, Lucretius, Plautus) is convincing and engaging. An excursus concentrates on Ennius and Euripides, whereby it exemplifies the perception of choral parts in drama ‘as lyric poetry in their own right’ (Swift in ‘Dramatic Lyric’, 377f.). Laevius’ technopaegnia , inspired by Simmias of Rhodes, get surprisingly full treatment. They constitute the juncture to the second part (‘After the Augustans’), which begins with late antique Optatian and his extravagant geometric poems, which seem to be more influenced by Horace and Catullus than by Greek predecessors (rather vague receptions of Vestinus and Simmias are mentioned). Due to the technopaegnia juncture, the chronology is not observed when Seneca the Younger is discussed after Optatian. His reception of Pindar in Thyestes is interesting, but one would like to have more extensive quotations from the relevant passages for comparison. In the chapter introduction, Allendorf shows awareness for his ‘most obvious omissions’ (425): the rich material for Greek reception in Statius and Martial remains unexplored. In an introductory companion, the reader would perhaps prefer those to the rather special and somewhat remote case of Optatian, who depends on Latin poets more than on Greek lyric. Studies of Statius and Martial could be encouraged in the ‘further reading’ section.

At the end of the volume, de Brose presents the state of affairs in Brazil. He first summarises the history of Classics since the 16 th century, then focuses on more recent direct translations of Greek lyric, mainly Pindar, into Brazilian Portuguese. His essay broadens the horizons of familiar reception areas. Although the study of Greek lyric in Brazil does not yet have a long and rich tradition, and therefore its artistic reception is even less established, de Brose conveys a valuable insight into the highly complex matter of adequate translations, inventive and intelligible use of the target language, and concepts such as ‘transcreative translation’.

A noteworthy feature of the volume is the repeated appearance of significant fragments of Greek lyric, particularly those of Sappho, in various contexts. This allows the reader to gradually become familiar with them from multiple perspectives. Two examples of Sappho beyond Lardinois’ essay: (1) Sappho’s Tithonus poem P.Köln 11.429 appears e.g. in Athanassaki (bitterness of old age); Furley (religion, immortality); Kelly (Tithonus between epic and lyric); Sampson (restorations of the first two verses). (2) Sappho 31 appears e.g. in D’Angour (Sapphic stanza); Boas (spatial deixis); Allendorf (Latin reception before the Augustans); Silverblank (Anne Carson’s translation in If Not, Winter ). In comparison to Budelmann’s 2009 Cambridge Companion to Greek Lyric, [5] this volume has a clear advantage in Section 2. While Budelmann’s companion also includes ‘Language and pragmatics’ (with a helpful map of dialect areas on page 121, which would have suited de Kreij’s chapter, too) and ‘Metre and music’, it lacks, for instance, anything comparable to the invaluable introduction to papyrology.

This new companion provides a comprehensive survey of key information and perspectives on Greek lyric in an accessible language. In the discussions, excessively detailed and subtle scholarly questions are generally avoided, as is fitting for a companion. Its 35 knowledgeable chapters will meet the expectations and needs of Classics students who embark on an in-depth study of Greek lyric.

Authors and Titles

Lucia Athanassaki, ‘The Lyric Chorus’

William Furley, ‘Religion and Ritual in Early Greek Lyric’

Adrian Kelly, ‘Epic and Lyric’

Nigel Nicholson, ‘Commemorating the Athlete’

Marek Węcowski, ‘Aristocracy, Aristocratic Culture, and the Symposium’

Jonathan M. Hall, ‘Politics’

C. Michael Sampson, ‘Papyrology’

Tom Phillips, ‘Citation and Transmission’

Armand D’Angour, ‘Meter and Music’

Mark de Kreij, ‘The Lyric Dialects’

Evert van Emde Boas, ‘Deixis and World Building’

Annette Giesecke, ‘Lyric Space: Sappho and Aphrodite’s Sanctuary’

Jane Montgomery Griffiths, ‘Sappho, Performance, and Acting Fragments’

Klaus Lennartz, ‘Iambos’

Krystyna Bartol, ‘Elegy’

P. J. Finglass, ‘Stesichorus’

Timothy Power, ‘Alcman’

André Lardinois, ‘Sappho’

Henry Spelman, ‘Alcaeus’

Ettore Cingano, ‘Ibycus and Anacreon’

Ewen Bowie, ‘Solon and Theognis’

Richard Rawles, ‘Simonides’

Christopher Brown, ‘Pindar’

David Fearn, ‘Bacchylides’

Pauline A. LeVen, ‘The New Music’

Laura Swift, ‘Dramatic Lyric’

A. D. Morrison, ‘The Lyres of Orpheus: The Transformations of Lyric in the Hellenistic Period’

Andreas T. Zanker, ‘Greek Iambic and Lyric in Horace’

Tobias Allendorf, ‘Greek Lyric at Rome: Before and After Augustan Poetry’

John T. Hamilton, ‘The Gift of Song: German Receptions of Pindar’

Patricia Rosenmeyer, ‘“Anacreon” in America’

William Allan, ‘Greek Lyric: A View from the North’

Marguerite Johnson, ‘Sappho and the Feminist Movement: Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries’

Hannah Silverblank, ‘Anne Carson’s Lyric Temporalities: Desire, Immortality, and Time in the Fragments of Sappho and Stesichorus’

Robert de Brose, ‘Greek Lyric and Pindar in Brazil’

[1] The reader might sometimes miss the Greek text of important fragments alongside the English translations, e.g. the fragments by Sappho, Alcman, and Pindar on pp. 6‒9.

[2] Bing, P.: ‘ Anacreontea avant la lettre: Euripides’ Cyclops 495‒518’, in Baumbach, M. / Dümmler, N. (ed.): Imitate Anacreon! Mimesis, Poiesis and the Poetic Inspiration in the Carmina Anacreontea (Millennium Studies 46), Berlin 2014, 25‒45.

[3] The following pertinent monograph could be added to the bibliography: Mundt, F.: Römische Klassik und griechische Lyrik. Transformationen der Archaik in augusteischer Zeit (Zetemata 155), Munich 2018.

[4] Feeney, D.: ‘Horace and the Greek Lyric Poets’, in Rudd, N. (ed.): Horace 2000: A Celebration. Essays for the Bimillennium , London 1993, 41–63, 44.

[5] Budelmann, F. (ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Greek Lyric , Cambridge 2009.

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During a visit to kyiv, secretary of state antony blinken played neil young’s “rockin’ in the free world” with a local band at a bar in a show of support for ukraine..

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At the end of a somber day in the Ukrainian capital, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken slipped into a seat at Barman Dictat, a crowded basement cocktail bar where a punk-jazz band was squealing away.

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Mr. Blinken’s onstage foray quickly drew barbs online from critics who, citing starvation in Gaza or horror in Kharkiv, said that this was no time for a cabinet official to be jamming in jeans. “This is not a serious administration,” a Republican National Committee account posted on the social media.

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Michael Crowley covers the State Department and U.S. foreign policy for The Times. He has reported from nearly three dozen countries and often travels with the secretary of state. More about Michael Crowley

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With his army making advances in Ukraine and his political grip tightened at home, President Vladimir Putin of Russia arrived in Beijing  in search of another win: more support from his “dear friend,” Xi Jinping .

World’s Nuclear Inspector: Rafael Grossi took over the International Atomic Energy Agency five years ago at what now seems like a far less fraught moment. With atomic fears everywhere, the inspector is edging toward mediator .

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