lyric

Literary genre including any short, personal, and passionate form of verse, usually a meditation on a single idea or theme with the goal of evoking emotion. The term does not imply a particular rhythm, rhyme scheme, or technique but an interest in limiting experience to a single, emotional peak; in this way, lyric poetry can be distinguished from narrative verse. A lyric poem often presents a speaker who expresses his or her state of mind or thought processes. Sonnets, odes, and elegies are all lyric poems. Originally, a lyric was a song sung to a lyre, and song texts are still called lyrics.