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e personality of the poet.
CHAPTER VIII
RELATIONSHIPS AND TYPES OF THE LYRIC
"Milk-Woman. What song was it, I pray? Was it 'Come, shepherds, deck your heads'? or, 'As at noon Dulcina rested'? or, 'Phillida flouts me'? or, 'Chevy Chase'? or, 'Johnny Armstrong'? or, 'Troy Town'?" ISAAC WALTON, The Complete Angler
We have already considered, at the beginning of the previous chapter, the general relationship of the three chief types of poetry. Lyric, epic and drama, i.e. song, story and play, have obviously different functions to perform. They may indeed deal with a common fund of material. A given event, say the settlement of Virginia, or the episode of Pocahontas, provides situations and emotions which may take either lyric or narrative or dramatic shape. The mental habits and technical experience of the poet, or the prevalent literary fashions of his day, may determine which general type of poetry he will employ. There were born lyrists, like Greene in the Elizabethan period, who wrote plays because the public demanded drama, and there have been natural dramatists who were compelled, in a period when the theatre fell into disrepute, to give their material a narrative form. But we must also take into account the dominant mood or quality of certain poetic minds. Many passages in narrative and dramatic verse, for instance, while fulfilling their primary function of telling a story or throwing characters into action, are colored by what we have called the lyric quality, by that passionate, personal feeling whose natural mode of expression is in song. In Marlowe's Tamburlaine, for instance, or Victor Hugo's Hernani, there are superb pieces of lyric declamation, in which we feel that Marlowe and Hugo themselves--not the imaginary Tamburlaine and Hernani--are chanting the desires of their own hearts. Arnold's "Sohrab and Rustum," after finishing its tragic story of the son slain by the unwitting father, closes with a lyr