Excerpt from On the Nature of Lyric

Cite it in an animated and impassioned manna. He is expected to do with it just what he must do with any work of art presented on its merits - with a piece of music or a picture no lees than with a poem. The mood and suggestion must come home to him as be longing to himself, he must be in touch with the effect the poet intended to convey.' And it is because the establishing of this relation is the final achievement of the poem, because one can pick up a book, read, and be haunted thenceforward by the way the verses sound and move to oneself, that the poet may well come to be content with this process and this achievement. As a matter of fact, the etymological sense is never what the modern man has in mind when he uses the word lyric. Nor does he use it in such severe distinction from other terms as Wordsworth would have one do. Victorian poetry abounds, for instance, in the idyll, to which so often a lyrical form. Quality, or atmosphere has been given that it would be difficult entirely to dissociate it from the pure lyric in our thoughts. The incursion of the dramatic element amounts to almost the same thing the dramatic lyric of Browning has much in common with the idyll of Tennyson. Thus for the moment it may perhaps be safer to mark off what is meant by lyric by laying down what it is not, and to restate our con tention in the words that the age of epic is over and poetic drama a less vital form than it was. To quote again from J. A. Symonds: The Victorian age can boast no national drama. Poetical plays have indeed been produced which do credit to the talents of their authors. Yet the century has not expressed its real.

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