Note 1059 — Chapter VII · THE EARLIEST DIFFERENTIATIONS OF POETRY

Definitions are notoriously unsatisfactory in poetics. Contrast Schleiermacher’s formula for lyric as poetry plus music, Aesthetik, p. 628, with the laborious definition in R. M. Werner’s Lyrik und Lyriker, Hamburg and Leipzig, 1890, p. 10, based mainly on the subjective element. Confusion of form and conditions, which makes lyric poetry one with music (see Döring, Kunstlehre d. Aristoteles, p. 88), with inner meaning and purpose, has caused most of the trouble. In one sense the old choral was the very foundation of lyric. The congregational psalm of the Hebrews is lyric, and so is the solitary cry of the modern poet.