definition of lyric essay

Writing Without Limits: Understanding the Lyric Essay

Sean Glatch  |  February 28, 2023  |  8 Comments

In literary nonfiction, no form is quite as complicated as the lyric essay. Lyrical essays explore the elements of poetry and creative nonfiction in complex and experimental ways, combining the subject matter of autobiography with poetry’s figurative devices and musicality of language.

For both poets and creative nonfiction writers, lyric essays are a gold standard of experimentation and language, but conquering the form takes lots of practice. What is a lyric essay, and how do you write one? Let’s break down this challenging CNF form, with lyric essay examples, before examining how you might approach it yourself.

Want to explore the lyric essay further? See our lyric essay writing course with instructor Gretchen Clark. 

What is a lyric essay?

The lyric essay combines the autobiographical information of a personal essay with the figurative language, forms, and experimentations of poetry. In the lyric essay, the rules of both poetry and prose become suggestions, because the form of the essay is constantly changing, adapting to the needs, ideas, and consciousness of the writer.

Lyric essay definition: The lyric essay combines autobiographical writing with the figurative language, forms, and experimentations of poetry.

Lyric essays are typically written in a poetic prose style . (We’ll expand on the difference between prose poetry and lyric essay shortly.) Lyric essays employ many of the poetic devices that poets use, including devices of repetition and rhetorical devices in literature.

That said, there are few conventions for the lyric essay, other than to experiment, experiment, experiment. While the form itself is an essay, there’s no reason you can’t break the bounds of expression.

One tactic, for example, is to incorporate poetry into the essay itself. You might start your essay with a normal paragraph, then describe something specific through a sonnet or villanelle , then express a different idea through a POV shift, a list, or some other form. Lyric essays can also borrow from the braided essay, the hermit crab, and other forms of creative nonfiction .

In truth, there’s very little that unifies all lyric essays, because they’re so wildly experimental. They’re also a bit tricky to define—the line between a lyric essay and the prose poem, in particular, is very hazy.

Rather than apply a one-size-fits-all definition for the lyric essay, which doesn’t exist, let’s pay close attention to how lyric essayists approach the open-ended form.

There are few conventions for the lyric essay, other than to experiment, experiment, experiment

Personal essay vs. lyric essay: An example of each

At its simplest, the lyric essay’s prose style is different from that of the personal essay, or other forms of creative nonfiction.

Personal essay example

Here are the opening two paragraphs from Beth Ann Fennelly’s personal essay “ I Survived the Blizzard of ’79. ”

“We didn’t question. Or complain. It wouldn’t have occurred to us, and it wouldn’t have helped. I was eight. Julie was ten.

We didn’t know yet that this blizzard would earn itself a moniker that would be silk-screened on T-shirts. We would own such a shirt, which extended its tenure in our house as a rag for polishing silver.”

The prose in this personal essay excerpt is descriptive, linear, and easy to understand. Fennelly gives us the information we need to make sense of her world, as well as the foreshadow of what’s to come in her essay.

Lyric essay example

Now, take this excerpt from a lyric essay, “ Life Code ” by J. A. Knight:

“The dream goes like this: blue room of water. God light from above. Child’s fist, foot, curve, face, the arc of an eye, the symmetry of circles… and then an opening of this body—which surprised her—a movement so clean and assured and then the push towards the light like a frog or a fish.” 

The prose in Knight’s lyric essay cannot be read the same way as a personal essay might be. Here, Knight’s prose is a sort of experience—a way of exploring the dream through language as shifting and ethereal as dreams themselves. Where the personal essay transcribes experiences, the lyric essay creates them.

Where the personal essay transcribes experiences, the lyric essay creates them.

For more examples of the craft, The Seneca Review and Eastern Iowa Review both have a growing archive of lyric essays submitted to their journals. In essence, there is no form to a lyric essay—rather, form and language are experimented with interchangeably, guided only by the narrative you seek to write.

Lyric Essay Vs Prose Poem

Lyric essays are commonly confused with prose poetry . In truth, there is no clear line separating the two, and plenty of essays, including some of the lyric essay examples in this article, can also be called prose poems.

Well, what’s the difference? A prose poem, broadly defined, is a poem written in paragraphs. Unlike a traditional poem, the prose poem does not make use of line breaks: the line breaks simply occur at the end of the page. However, all other tactics of poetry are in the prose poet’s toolkit, and you can even play with poetry forms in the prose poem, such as writing the prose sonnet .

Lyric essays also blend the techniques of prose and poetry. Here are some general differences between the two:

• Lyric essays tend to be longer. A prose poem is rarely more than a page. Some lyric essays are longer than 20 pages.
• Lyric essays tend to be more experimental. One paragraph might be in prose, the next, poetry. The lyric essay might play more with forms like lists, dreams, public signs, or other types of media and text.
• Prose poems are often more stream-of-conscious. The prose poet often charts the flow of their consciousness on the page. Lyric essayists can do this, too, but there’s often a broader narrative organizing the piece, even if it’s not explicitly stated or recognizable.

The two share many similarities, too, including:

• An emphasis on language, musicality, and ambiguity.
• Rejection of “objective meaning” and the desire to set forth arguments.
• An unobstructed flow of ideas.
• Suggestiveness in thoughts and language, rather than concrete, explicit expressions.
• Surprising or unexpected juxtapositions .
• Ingenuity and play with language and form.

In short, there’s no clear dividing line between the two. Often, the label of whether a piece is a lyric essay or a prose poem is up to the writer.

Lyric Essay Examples

The following lyric essay examples are contemporary and have been previously published online. Pay attention to how the lyric essayists interweave the essay form with a poet’s attention to language, mystery, and musicality.

“Lodge: A Lyric Essay” by Emilia Phillips

Retrieved here, from Blackbird .

This lush, evocative lyric essay traverses the American landscape. The speaker reacts to this landscape finding poetry in the rundown, and seeing her own story—family trauma, religion, and the random forces that shape her childhood. Pay attention to how the essay defies conventional standards of self-expression. In between narrative paragraphs are lists, allusions, memories, and the many twists and turns that seem to accompany the narrator on their journey through Americana.

“Spiral” by Nicole Callihan

Retrieved here, from Birdcoat Quarterly . 

Notice how this gorgeous essay evolves down the spine of its central theme: the sleepless swallows. The narrator records her thoughts about the passage of time, her breast examination, her family and childhood, and the other thoughts that arise in her mind as she compares them, again and again, to the mysterious swallows who fly without sleep. This piece demonstrates how lyric essays can encompass a wide array of ideas and threads, creating a kaleidoscope of language for the reader to peer into, come away with something, peer into again, and always see something different.

“Star Stuff” by Jessica Franken

Retrieved here, from Seneca Review .

This short, imagery -driven lyric essay evokes wonder at our seeming smallness, our seeming vastness. The narrator juxtaposes different ideas for what the body can become, playing with all our senses and creating odd, surprising connections. Read this short piece a few times. Ask yourself, why are certain items linked together in the same paragraph? What is the train of thought occurring in each new sentence, each new paragraph? How does the final paragraph wrap up the lyric essay, while also leaving it open ended? There’s much to interpret in this piece, so engage with it slowly, read it over several times.

5 approaches to writing the lyric essay

This form of creative writing is tough for writers because there’s no proper formula for writing it. However, if you have a passion for imaginative forms and want to rise to the challenge, here are several different ways to write your essay.

1. Start with your narrative

Writing the lyrical essay is a lot like writing creative nonfiction: it starts with getting words on the page. Start with a simple outline of the story you’re looking to write. Focus on the main plot points and what you want to explore, then highlight the ideas or events that will be most difficult for you to write about. Often, the lyrical form offers the writer a new way to talk about something difficult. Where words fail, form is key. Combining difficult ideas and musicality allows you to find the right words when conventional language hasn’t worked.

Emilia Phillips’ lyric essay “ Lodge ” does exactly this, letting the story’s form emphasize its language and the narrative Phillips writes about dreams, traveling, and childhood emotions.

2. Identify moments of metaphor and figurative language

The lyric essay is liberated from form, rather than constrained by it. In a normal essay, you wouldn’t want your piece overrun by figurative language, but here, boundless metaphors are encouraged—so long as they aid your message. For some essayists, it might help to start by reimagining your story as an extended metaphor.

A great example of this is Zadie Smith’s essay “ The Lazy River ,” which uses the lazy river as an extended metaphor to criticize a certain “go with the flow” mindset.

Use extended metaphors as a base for the essay, then return to it during moments of transition or key insight. Writing this way might help ground your writing process while giving you new opportunities to play with form.

3. Investigate and braid different threads

Just like the braided essay , lyric essays can certainly braid different story lines together. If anything, the freedom to play with form makes braiding much easier and more exciting to investigate. How can you use poetic forms to braid different ideas together? Can you braid an extended metaphor with the main story? Can you separate the threads into a contrapuntal, then reunite them in prose?

A simple example of threading in lyric essay is Jane Harrington’s “ Ossein Pith .” Harrington intertwines the “you” and “I” of the story, letting each character meet only when the story explores moments of “hunger.”

Whichever threads you choose to write, use the freedom of the lyric essay to your advantage in exploring the story you’re trying to set down.

4. Revise an existing piece into a lyric essay

Some CNF writers might find it easier to write their essay, then go back and revise with the elements of poetic form and figurative language. If you choose to take this route, identify the parts of your draft that don’t seem to be working, then consider changing the form into something other than prose.

For example, you might write a story, then realize it would greatly benefit the prose if it was written using the poetic device of anaphora (a repetition device using a word or phrase at the beginning of a line or paragraph). Chen Li’s lyric essay “ Baudelaire Street ” does a great job of this, using the anaphora “I would ride past” to explore childhood memory.

When words don’t work, let the lyrical form intervene.

5. Write stream-of-conscious

Stream-of-consciousness is a writing technique in which the writer charts, word-for-word, the exact order of their unfiltered thoughts on the page.

If it isn’t obvious, this is easier said than done. We naturally think faster than we write, and we also have a tendency to filter our thoughts as we think them, to the point where many thoughts go unconsciously unnoticed. Unlearning this takes a lot of practice and skill.

Nonetheless, you might notice in the lyric essay examples we shared how the essayists followed different associations with their words, one thought flowing naturally into the next, circling around a subject rather than explicitly defining it. The stream-of-conscious technique is perfect for this kind of writing, then, because it earnestly excavates the mind, creating a kind of Rorschach test that the reader can look into, interpret, see for themselves.

This technique requires a lot of mastery, but if you’re keen on capturing your own consciousness, you may find that the lyric essay form is the perfect container to hold it in.

Closing thoughts on the lyric essay form

Creative nonfiction writers have an overt desire to engage their readers with insightful stories. When language fails, the lyrical essay comes to the rescue. Although this is a challenging form to master, practicing different forms of storytelling could pave new avenues for your next nonfiction piece. Try using one of these different ways to practice the lyric craft, and get writing your next CNF story!

[…] Sean “Writing Your Truth: Understanding the Lyric Essay.” writers.com. https://writers.com/understanding-the-lyric-essay published 19 May, 2020/ accessed 13 Oct, […]

[…] https://writers.com/understanding-the-lyric-essay […]

I agree with every factor that you have pointed out. Thank you for sharing your beautiful thoughts on this. A personal essay is writing that shares an interesting, thought-provoking, sometimes entertaining, and humorous piece that is often drawn from the writer’s personal experience and at times drawn from the current affairs of the world.

[…] been wanting to learn more about lyric essay, and this seems a natural transition from […]

thanks for sharing

Thanks so much for this. Here is an updated link to my essay Spiral: https://www.birdcoatquarterly.com/post/nicole-callihan

I’m interested in learning about essays to write my memoir, so I shall be back.

Leave a Comment Cancel Reply

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

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.

Thank you for signing up! Keep an eye on your inbox. By signing up you agree to our terms of use

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 .

You Might Also Like

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!

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE

Literary City Spotlight: Ithaca Edition

Freedom’s Verses: 7 Poems Celebrating Independence

Poetry Collections to Pair with Noah Kahan’s Stick Season

Purdue Online Writing Lab Purdue OWL® College of Liberal Arts

Lyric Essays

Welcome to the Purdue OWL

This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue University. When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice.

Copyright ©1995-2018 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use.

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.

Novlr is now writer-owned! Join us and shape the future of creative writing.

19 January 2024

An Insider’s Guide to Writing the Perfect Lyrical Essay

As the name might suggest, the lyrical essay or the lyric essay is a literary hybrid, combining features of poetry, essay, and often memoir . The lyrical essay is a form of creative non-fiction that has become more popular over the last decade.

There has been much written about what lyrical essays are and aren’t, and many writers have strong opinions about them, either declaring them expressive and playful, or self-indulgent and nonsensical. 

Today, you’ll learn what a lyrical essay is, what literary elements and techniques they usually employ, and how they depart from other forms of writing and why writers might choose to write them. You’ll also find recommendations for some top lyrical essays to start familiarising yourself with.  

What is the lyrical essay?

Lyrical essays combine the rich, figurative language and musicality of poetry with the long-form focus of the essay. A lyrical essay is like the poem in its shapeliness and rhythmic style, but it also borrows from elements of the essay, using narrative to explore a particular topic in an extended way. 

What makes this form of writing so distinctive is that it draws attention to its own use of language. Like poems, lyrical essays create certain effects with the words they choose, and are condensed in the way poetry is, attempting to communicate complexity and depth in as few words as possible. 

What makes a good lyrical essay? 

As with essays and poems, lyrical essays can be about any subject. Many lyrical essays tend to engage with topics such as philosophy, art, culture, history , beauty, politics, and nature, or a mixture of these subjects. They typically focus on a series of images of a person, place, or object, with the aim of evoking emotion in the reader by using very sensory details. A lyrical essay is written in an intimate voice, usually in the first person with a conversational and informal tone. Often, they are memoiristic, but they don’t have to be. 

While lyrical essays take on the longer-form shape of essays, they are not organized as a narrative, with one event unfolding in a chronological or even logical order. Instead, the writer usually creates a series of fragmented images using figurative language and poetic techniques in a looser, more playful way. Some lyrical essayists draw on research and fact to inform their writing, but lyrical essays are usually more suggestive and explorative than they are definitive or conclusive. 

Creative techniques

Like poems, lyric essays often use white space creatively. Text can be displayed in chunks, bullet points, and on only parts of the page, rather than conforming to the typical paragraph structure you’d find in normal prose. Lyric essays might include asterisks, double spaces, and numbers to frame parts of the writing in new ways. They sometimes include drawings, documents, photos, or other images that add meaning to the words in some way. 

As with poetry, reading lyrical essays can be an intense experience. Instead of being immersed in narrative and plot, the reader is immersed in structure and form, always being reminded of how the language is shifting. Lyric essays are playful, and as such, they can surprise and delight you with their ingenuity. 

Lyrical essays usually contain some of the following techniques and features: 

• Poetic language – alliteration, assonance, and internal rhyme
• Figurative language – metaphors and similes
• Intimate voice and tone – first person in a conversational and friendly style 
• Imagery – sensory images of people, places, things, objects, and ideas
• Variety –  an array of sentence styles and patterns  
• Questions – posed for the reader to answer 
• Juxtaposition and contradiction 
• Rhythm or rhythmic prose
• Creative presentation of text – text displayed in a fragmented way, with white space, asterisks, subtitles etc to separate or highlight sections of the essay
• Inconclusive ending – often ends without answering the questions posed in the essay

Literary reception

One of the most popular criticisms of the lyrical essay is that they are self-indulgent. Some writers and readers feel strongly that lyrical essays are simply disjointed thoughts that are strung together without any order and that they go nowhere. Some people criticise them as a stream of consciousness, but that is also what others like about them. Those who defend lyrical essays think that they are one of the most exciting and unique forms of writing. 

Deborah Tall, an American writer, poet and teacher, explains that the fragmented nature of lyrical essays is what makes them so interesting. She said that lyrical essays take shape “mosaically” and that their power and importance are “visible only when one stands back and sees it whole.” She goes on to say that the story a lyrical essay 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”. But she celebrates this very fact, as it is this unique construction that elucidates meaning.

Lyrical essays allow writers the freedom to push poetic prose until an important and emotional message pops from the page. 

Recommended Lyrical Essays

What’s missing here a fragmentary, lyric essay about fragmentary, lyric essays by julia marie wade (from a harp in the stars: an anthology of lyric essays ).

What’s Missing Here? is an extraordinary piece of meta-writing – a lyrical essay about lyrical essays – from author and Professor of creative fiction, Julia Marie Wade. It is an absolute joy to read, at once challenging and fun, and also highly informative as it uses the techniques of lyrical essays to explain what they are and what they can do.

It’s one of the best examples of a clever and engaging lyrical essay, and it’s from a fantastic collection that is worth delving into if you’re interested in learning more about this unique literary hybrid. 

Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine

In Don’t Let Me Be Lonely , Claudia Rankine explores isolation, depression, death, and violence in post-9/11 America.

Rankine writes in short sections surrounded by white space and uses images of the television to explore our relationship to the media. It’s a powerful look at culture that is meditative and achingly sad from one of America’s best poets. 

Bluets by Maggie Nelson

Maggie Nelson is a genre-busting writer who defies classification. Bluets winds its way through depression, divinity, alcohol, and desire, visiting famous blue figures including Joni Mitchell, Billie Holiday, Leonard Cohen, and Andy Warhol along the way. While its narrator sets out to muse about her lifelong obsession with the colour blue, she ends up facing the painful end of an affair and the grievous injury of a friend.

Bluets is made up of short essayistic, poetic paragraphs, organized in a numbered list. It’s a vulnerable, personal, and philosophical lyrical essay, full of innovation and grace. 

Note: All purchase links in this post are affiliate links through BookShop.org, and Novlr may earn a small commission – every purchase supports independent bookstores.

• Poem Guides
• Poem of the Day
• Collections
• Harriet Books
• Featured Blogger
• Articles Home
• All Articles
• Podcasts Home
• All Podcasts
• Glossary of Poetic Terms
• Poetry Out Loud
• Upcoming Events
• All Past Events
• Exhibitions
• Poetry Magazine Home
• Current Issue
• Poetry Magazine Archive
• Subscriptions
• About the Magazine
• How to Submit
• Advertise with Us
• About Us Home
• Foundation News
• Awards & Grants
• Media Partnerships
• Press Releases
• Newsletters

What's a Lyrical Essay? A Review of Elisa Gabbert's The Word Pretty

• Share on Twitter
• Share on Facebook
• Print this page
• Email this page

GD Dess reviews Elisa Gabbert 's latest collection of writing, The Word Pretty , and considers the lyrical essay's recent abundance. At Los Angeles Review of Books , Dess writes: "The lyrical essay has proliferated in recent years. Its antecedents can be traced back to 1966 when Truman Capote, author of  In Cold Blood  (1965), introduced the idea of the 'nonfiction novel' in an interview with George Plimpton for  The New York Times . Over the years, the burgeoning genre of creative nonfiction, as well as the increased publication of personal essays, led to the development of what has come to be called the lyrical essay." More: 

An influential definition of the form, by John D’Agata and Deborah Tall, was published in the  Seneca Review  in 1997: 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. Lyrical essays are often viewed as being closer to stream of consciousness or koan-like riddles than traditional essays. They are notably difficult to critique because of their association with poetry and the poetic license they claim as their due. When D’Agata and Tall wrote that the lyrical essay “partakes of the essay in its weight,” they were pointing to the ways it draws from our common understanding of what an essay is. While a precise definition of “essay” has remained elusive, readers can generally agree that the genre typically presents an author’s thinking about a particular subject; it involves an examination of a topic in the form of an argument. Arguments consist of premises leading to a conclusion. Like a concerto, then, essays generally adhere to a logical form. But lyrical essays are more like jazz than a concerto. The idea that lyrical essays are more poetic than logical has allowed authors to play fast and loose with the truth, as D’Agata did in his 2010 essay “What Happens There,” in which he reported on the suicide of Levi Presley in Las Vegas. The essay was rejected by  Harper ’s because of factual inaccuracies but was eventually published in  The Believer . The ongoing dialogue between D’Agata and the fact-checker Jim Fingal morphed into the book  The Lifespan of a Fact (2012), in which they debated the liminal space between fact-based truth and art.

Dess goes on to sharply critique Gabbert's collection. In possibly his most generous moment, Dess writes:

When Gabbert is simply connecting thoughts or images, her chatty tone — which, unfortunately, descends into snark all too often — is easy to digest. There are many statements that raise an eyebrow, but you’re likely to grant them a pass in order to keep reading. As there is no formal argument in this style of writing, you just float along the narrative stream. But when Gabbert moves into the more treacherous waters of analysis, she encounters difficulty and following her becomes problematic.

Read on at Los Angeles Review of Books .

• Los Angeles Review of Books
• Poetry News
• Audio Poems
• Audio Poem of the Day
• Twitter Find us on Twitter
• Facebook Find us on Facebook
• Instagram Find us on Instagram
• Facebook Find us on Facebook Poetry Foundation Children
• Twitter Find us on Twitter Poetry Magazine
• Privacy Policy
• Terms of Use
• Poetry Mobile App
• 61 West Superior Street, Chicago, IL 60654
• © 2024 Poetry Foundation

• Guidelines & Submissions
• Editors’ Blog
• Back Issues
• Blogging Guidelines
• Books by WAG Members
• Members’ Websites & Blogs
• Critique Pods
• Beta Readers
• Marketing Coalition
• Mentoring Program

What is Lyric Essay? A Brief Outline

Writing the lyric essay offers the author a frolic in the pool of memoir, biography, poetry and personal essay mixed with a sprinkling of experimental. Sound confusing? It can be. I am currently learning to write lyric essay and often trip over my fiction background in presenting my “truth” with a poetic lilt. It takes some practice to “get” this form. However, it is now my favorite genre next to prose poetry and flash fiction. In lyric essay the narrative might break up into sections, evolve and trail away into white space, poetry and often, repetition.The author’s imagination can explode with the possibilities.

Lyric essay flourishes with the braiding of multiple themes, a back and forth weave of story and implication, the bending of narrative shape and insertion of poetic device such as broken lines, white space and repetition. There is a similarity between this form and flash fiction or prose poetry. In this genre, the author must offer his/her truth, a unique perspective, whatever that might be.

An excerpt from Anne Carson’s Beauty and the Husband demonstrates how this form lends itself to the wild and experimental. [Editor’s Note: Read the excerpt by following the link and clicking “Read an Excerpt” below the image of the book cover.]

The following lines are a sample from an essay I wrote. It further demonstrates this form’s experimentation with memoir, truth and form.

My father insisted on bringing his best friend—the ginger-haired man he encouraged my mother to see every day. His large frame shadowed the paths along which he walked. He tossed me onto his shoulders and neighed like a horse with beer breath, everyone laughing at his Australian humor. They told me to call him “Uncle.” But he wasn’t a blood uncle, just a “close friend” who should be “respected” like an uncle. bastard heavily freckled arms muscled all over punch worthy body huge fists calloused knuckles beer bellied bastard

Here’s an exercise to practice writing a lyric essay.

Take three objects at random from your kitchen or desk drawer. Write a paragraph or a poem about what each one says to you, triggers or suggests. Set the timer for fifteen minutes. At the end, decide what themes connect these memories. Braid them together into a story. Experiment with form, using poetic devices such as repetition, broken lines and white space. Create a memoir byte in the reader’s mind and let them hear your story through this interesting format. Lyric essay can be short or long. Have a friend read what you wrote or post it on your blog.

Enjoy playing with this wild card, the lyric essay.

Recommended Reading

• Writing Creative Nonfiction: Instruction and Insights from Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs , Carolyn Forché and Philip Gerard, ed.
• Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola.
• A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments by Roland Barthes (trans. Richard Howard)
• Bluets by Maggie Nelson
• About Author
• Latest Posts

Kaye Linden

Latest posts from kaye linden.

• Minimalism in Tiny Stories - January 18, 2020
• Flat and Round Characters in Fiction - May 23, 2018
• What is Voice? - February 28, 2018

Connie Morrison

Hi Kaye, This sounds a little like free writing. I’m eager to try the exercise, and thanks for sharing this.

• Craft and Criticism
• Fiction and Poetry
• News and Culture
• Lit Hub Radio
• Reading Lists

• Literary Criticism
• Craft and Advice
• In Conversation
• On Translation
• Short Story
• From the Novel
• Bookstores and Libraries
• Film and TV
• Art and Photography
• Freeman’s
• The Virtual Book Channel
• Behind the Mic
• Beyond the Page
• The Cosmic Library
• The Critic and Her Publics
• Emergence Magazine
• Fiction/Non/Fiction
• First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing
• The History of Literature
• I’m a Writer But
• Lit Century
• Tor Presents: Voyage Into Genre
• Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast
• Write-minded
• The Best of the Decade
• Best Reviewed Books
• BookMarks Daily Giveaway
• The Daily Thrill
• CrimeReads Daily Giveaway

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.

Previous Article

Next article.

• RSS - Posts

Literary Hub

Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature

Sign Up For Our Newsletters

How to Pitch Lit Hub

Advertisers: Contact Us

Privacy Policy

Support Lit Hub - Become A Member

Become a Lit Hub Supporting Member : Because Books Matter

For the past decade, Literary Hub has brought you the best of the book world for free—no paywall. But our future relies on you. In return for a donation, you’ll get an ad-free reading experience , exclusive editors’ picks, book giveaways, and our coveted Joan Didion Lit Hub tote bag . Most importantly, you’ll keep independent book coverage alive and thriving on the internet.

Become a member for as low as $5/month

• Craft Essays
• Teaching Resources

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 .

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

Click here to cancel reply.

© 2024 Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction. All Rights Reserved!

Designed by WPSHOWER

Lyric Poetry: Expressing Emotion Through Verse

This musical verse conveys powerful feelings.

 Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images

• Poetic Forms
• Favorite Poems & Poets
• Best Sellers
• Classic Literature
• Plays & Drama
• Shakespeare
• Short Stories
• Children's Books

• Doctor of Arts, University of Albany, SUNY
• M.S., Literacy Education, University of Albany, SUNY
• B.A., English, Virginia Commonwealth University

A lyric poem is short, highly musical verse that conveys powerful feelings. The poet may use rhyme, meter, or other literary devices to create a song-like quality.

Unlike narrative poetry , which chronicles events, lyric poetry doesn't have to tell a story. A lyric poem is a private expression of emotion by a single speaker. For example, American poet Emily Dickinson described inner feelings when she wrote her lyric poem that begins, "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, / And Mourners to and fro."

Key Takeways: Lyric Poetry

• A lyric poem is a private expression of emotion by an individual speaker.
• Lyric poetry is highly musical and can feature poetic devices like rhyme and meter.
• Some scholars categorize lyric poetry in three subtypes: Lyric of Vision, Lyric of Thought, and Lyric of Emotion. However, this classification is not widely agreed upon.

Origins of Lyric Poetry

Song lyrics often begin as lyric poems. In ancient Greece, lyric poetry was, in fact, combined with music played on a U-shaped stringed instrument called a lyre. Through words and music, great lyric poets like Sappho (ca. 610–570 B.C.) poured out feelings of love and yearning.

Similar approaches to poetry were developed in other parts of the world. Between the fourth century B.C. and the first century A.D., Hebrew poets composed intimate and lyrical psalms, which were sung in ancient Jewish worship services and compiled in the Hebrew Bible. During the eighth century, Japanese poets expressed their ideas and emotions through haiku and other forms. Writing about his private life, Taoist writer Li Po (710–762) became one of China's most celebrated poets.

The rise of lyric poetry in the Western world represented a shift from epic narratives about heroes and gods. The personal tone of lyric poetry gave it broad appeal. Poets in Europe drew inspiration from ancient Greece but also borrowed ideas from the Middle East, Egypt, and Asia.

Types of Lyric Poetry

Of the three main categories of poetry—narrative, dramatic, and lyric—lyric is the most common, and also the most difficult to classify. Narrative poems tell stories. Dramatic poetry is a play written in verse. Lyric poetry, however, encompasses a wide range of forms and approaches.

Nearly any experience or phenomenon can be explored in the emotional, personal lyric mode, from war and patriotism to love and art .

Lyric poetry also has no prescribed form. Sonnets , villanelles , rondeaus , and pantoums are all considered lyric poems. So are elegies, odes, and most occasional (or ceremonial) poems. When composed in free verse , lyric poetry achieves musicality through literary devices such as alliteration , assonance , and anaphora .

Each of the following examples illustrates an approach to lyric poetry.

William Wordsworth, "The World Is Too Much With Us"

The English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850) famously said that poetry is "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility." In " The World Is Too Much with Us ," his passion is evident in blunt exclamatory statements such as "a sordid boon!" Wordsworth condemns materialism and alienation from nature, as this section of the poem illustrates.

"The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!"

Although "The World Is Too Much with Us" feels spontaneous, it was clearly composed with care ("recollected in tranquility"). A Petrarchan sonnet, the complete poem has 14 lines with a prescribed rhyme scheme, metrical pattern, and arrangement of ideas. In this musical form, Wordsworth expressed personal outrage over the effects of the Industrial Revolution .

Christina Rossetti, "A Dirge"

British poet Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) composed " A Dirge " in rhyming couplets. The consistent meter and rhyme create the effect of a burial march. The lines grow progressively shorter, reflecting the speaker's sense of loss, as this selection from the poem illustrates.

"Why were you born when the snow was falling? 

You should have come to the cuckoo’s calling, 

Or when grapes are green in the cluster, 

Or, at least, when lithe swallows muster 

For their far off flying 

From summer dying." 

Using deceptively simple language, Rossetti laments an untimely death. The poem is an elegy, but Rossetti does not tell us who died. Instead, she speaks figuratively, comparing the span of a human life to the changing seasons.

Elizabeth Alexander, "Praise Song for the Day"

American poet Elizabeth Alexander (1962– ) wrote " Praise Song for the Day " to read at the 2009 inauguration of America's first Black president, Barack Obama . The poem does not rhyme, but it creates a song-like effect through rhythmic repetition of phrases. By echoing a traditional African form, Alexander paid tribute to African culture in the United States and called for people of all races to live together in peace.

"Say it plain: that many have died for this day.

Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,

who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built

brick by brick the glittering edifices

they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.

Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,

the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables."

"Praise Song for the Day" is rooted in two traditions. It is both an occasional poem, written and performed for a special occasion, and a praise song, an African form that uses descriptive word-pictures to capture the essence of something being praised.

Occasional poetry has played an important role in Western literature since the days of ancient Greece and Rome. Short or long, serious or lighthearted, occasional poems commemorate coronations, weddings, funerals, dedications, anniversaries, and other important events. Similar to odes, occasional poems are often passionate expressions of praise.

Classifying Lyric Poems

Poets are always devising new ways to express feelings and ideas, transforming our understanding of the lyric mode. Is a found poem lyric? What about a concrete poem made from artful arrangements of words on the page? To answer these questions, some scholars utilize three classifications for lyric poetry: Lyric of Vision, Lyric of Thought, and Lyric of Emotion.

Visual poetry like May Swenson's pattern poem, " Women ," belongs to the Lyric of Vision subtype. Swenson arranged lines and spaces in a zigzag pattern to suggest the image of women rocking and swaying to satisfy the whims of men. Other Lyric of Vision poets have incorporated colors, unusual typography, and 3D shapes .

Didactic poems designed to teach and intellectual poems such as satire may not seem especially musical or intimate, but these works can be placed in the Lyric of Thought category. For examples of this subtype, consider the scathing epistles by 18th-century British poet Alexander Pope .

The third subtype, Lyric of Emotion, refers to works we usually associate with lyric poetry as a whole: mystical, sensual, and emotional. However, scholars have long debated these classifications. The term "lyric poem" is often used broadly to describe any poem that is not a narrative or a stage play.

• Burch, Michael R. " The Best Lyric Poetry: Origins and History with a Definition and Examples. " The HyperTexts Journal.
• Gutman, Huck. " The Plight of the Modern Lyric Poet. " Except from a seminar lecture. “Identity, Relevance, Text: Reviewing English Studies.” Calcutta University, 8 Feb. 2001.
• Melani, Lilia. " Reading Lyric Poetry. " Adapted from A Guide to the Study of Literature: A Companion Text for Core Studies 6, Landmarks of Literature, Brooklyn College.
• Neziroski, Lirim. "Narrative, Lyric, Drama." Theories of Media, Keyword Glossary. University of Chicago. Winter 2003.
• The Poetry Foundation. "Saphho."
• Titchener, Frances B. " Chapter 5: Greek Lyric Poetry. " Ancient Literature and Language, A Guide to Writing in History and Classics.
• What Is a Sonnet?
• A List of Every Nobel Prize Winner in English Literature
• Romanticism in Literature: Definition and Examples
• Early Greek Poets Chronology
• What Is Narrative Poetry? Definition and Examples
• An Introduction to Blank Verse
• A Guide to Wordsworth's Themes of Memory and Nature in 'Tintern Abbey'
• 10 Classic Poems for Halloween
• Singing the Old Songs: Traditional and Literary Ballads
• How to Write an Ode
• Great War Poems
• An Introduction to Free Verse Poetry
• Presidential Inauguration Poems
• 42 Must-Read Feminist Female Authors
• An Introduction to the Song-Like Villanelle Form of Poetry
• 3 Poetry Activities for Middle School Students

Course Syllabus

Writing the Lyric Essay: When Poetry & Nonfiction Play

Experiment with form and explore the possibilities of this flexible genre..

Some of the most artful work being done in essay today exists in a liminal space that touches on the poetic. In this course, you will read and write lyric essays (pieces of creative nonfiction that move in ways often associated with poetry) using techniques such as juxtaposition; collage; white space; attention to sound; and loose, associative thinking. You will read lyric essays that experiment with form and genre in a variety of ways (such as the hermit crab essay, the braided essay, multimedia work), as well as hybrid pieces by authors working very much at the intersection of essay and poetry. We will proceed in this course with an attitude of play, openness, and communal exploration into the possibilities of the lyric essay, reaching for our own definitions and methods, even as we study the work of others for models and inspiration. Whether you are an aspiring essayist interested in infusing your work with fresh new possibilities, or a poet who wants to try essay, this course will have room for you to experiment and play.

How it works:

Each week provides:

• discussions of assigned readings and other general writing topics with peers and the instructor
• written lectures and a selection of readings

Some weeks also include:

• the opportunity to submit two essays of 1000 and 2500 words each for instructor and/or peer review 
• additional optional writing exercises
• an optional video conference that is open to all students(and which will be available afterward as a recording for those who cannot participate)

Aside from the live conference, there is no need to be online at any particular time of day. To create a better classroom experience for all, you are expected to participate weekly in class discussions to receive instructor feedback.

Week 1: Lyric Models: Space and Collage

In this first week, we’ll consider definitions and models for the lyric essay. You will read contemporary pieces that straddle the line between personal essay and poem, including work by Toi Derricotte, Anne Carson, and Maggie Nelson. In exercises, you will explore collage and the use of white space.

Week 2: Experiments with Form: Braided Essay and Hermit Crab Essay

We will build on our discussion of collage and white space, looking at examples of the braided essay. We’ll also examine the hermit crab essay, in which writers “sneak” personal essays into other forms, such as a job letter, shopping list, or how-to manual. You’ll experiment with your own braided pieces and hermit crab pieces and turn in the first assignment.

Week 3: Lyric Vignette and the Prose Poem

Prose poems will often capture emotional truths using juxtaposition, hyperbole, and absurd or surreal leaps of logic. This week, we’ll investigate how lyrical vignettes can stay true to actual events while employing some of the lyrical, dreamlike, and/or absurd qualities of the prose poem to communicate the wonder and mystery of life.

Week 4: Witnessing the Self: Essays by Poets

Poet Larry Levis has written of the poet as witness, as temporarily emptied of personality but simultaneously connected to a self, a “gazer.” Personal essays by poets retain something of this quality. Examining essays by poets such as Ross Gay, Lucia Perillo, Amy Gerstler, and Elizabeth Bishop, we’ll look at moments of connection and disconnection. Guided exercises will help you find and craft your own such moments.

Week 5: Hybrid Forms and the Documentary Impulse

As we wrap up the course, we will continue investigating the possibilities inherent in straddling and combining genres as we explore multimedia work, as well as work in the “documentary poetics” vein. We will look to writers like Claudia Rankine and Bernadette Mayer, Roz Chast and Maira Kalman for models of what is possible creatively when we observe ourselves as social beings moving through time, collecting text, images, and observations. Students will also turn in a final essay.

• Search Menu
• Sign in through your institution
• Advance articles
• Author Guidelines
• Submission Site
• Open Access Options
• Why Submit?
• About English
• About the English Association
• Editorial Board
• Advertising and Corporate Services
• Journals Career Network
• Self-Archiving Policy
• Dispatch Dates
• Terms and Conditions
• Publishers' Books for Review
• Journals on Oxford Academic
• Books on Oxford Academic

Article Contents

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

• < Previous

Emerson and the lyric essay in Maggie Nelson’s Bluets

• Article contents
• Figures & tables
• Supplementary Data

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

• Permissions Icon Permissions

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).

Email alerts

Citing articles via.

• Contact the English Association
• Recommend to your Library

Affiliations

• Online ISSN 1756-1124
• Print ISSN 0013-8215
• Copyright © 2024 The English Association
• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Institutional account management
• Rights and permissions
• Get help with access
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Definition of Lyric

Types of lyric, examples of lyric in literature, example #1: italian sonnet (by james deford).

“Turn back the heart you’ve turned away Give back your kissing breath Leave not my love as you have left The broken hearts of yesterday But wait, be still, don’t lose this way… Accept my love, live for today.”

Example #2: Ode to the West Wind (by Percy Bysshe Shelley)

“Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawaken’d earth The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”

Example #3: My Last Duchess (by Robert Browning)

Example #4: o captain my captain (by walt whitman), related posts:, post navigation.

We use cookies to give you the best experience possible. By continuing we’ll assume you’re on board with our cookie policy

What is a Lyric Essay

To understand the essence of a lyric composition, it is necessary to concentrate on the form and content of this assignment. A lyric essay is a kind of writing, which presents a blend of prose and poetry. The character of the text is always personal. It reflects the thoughts and feelings of the author working on it. By its form and content, a lyric essay resembles a prose poem. While crafting the piece, a writer applies a variety of ideas, images and stylistic means. Those can be connected to people, objects, nature, feeling, phenomena etc.

Exists no limitation when it concerns a lyric essay. The core ideas can be different starting from personal experience and ending with the application of various means to evoke reader’s emotions. There is no stated template. The text is organised individually by each author. The main aim is to produce a certain effect on the target audience. The composition may present a series of fragments creating certain lyrical mood, which is preserved throughout the whole text thanks to the relevant and successful usage of poetic language.

Lyric Essay Topics

The lyric essay presents a hybrid form of creative writing mediating between non-fiction and poetry. The main focus of the piece is usually made on employment of visual images, metaphors and symbols. The structuring and form of the composition of this type have no limits as well as its topicality. For that reason, the choice of a topic is an easy task, even if the scholarly supervisor provides no options to choose from.

A variety of topics exist, which can be chosen as a basis for a lyrical essay. Primarily, it is possible to discuss some feelings, emotions, which an author has experienced. The format of the lyric composition allows application of various stylistic devices and techniques, which may be handy in rendering his thoughts. Apart from that, it is possible to choose a certain piece of art, music or poetry and comprise a text, which will be a reflection on these.

Guidelines on Writing Lyric Essays

A lyric essay is a kind of personal essay, which presents a writer’s reflection on a certain issue or artistic piece. For that reason, the form and structuring of this essay may be chosen by each author individually. The essential task of a writer preparing this essay is to focus on the application of poetic language and one’s creative thinking abilities. Poetic and figurative language is a compulsory element of the successful lyric essay. Reach imagery background should also be created by a writer working of this type of text.

Exists a variety of techniques that are to be applied while dealing with poetic writing. The list includes making an accent on the connotation of notions presented, posing questions to the target audience, waking up the imagination of a target reader, encouraging of the associative thinking, creation of a particular tone and rhythm and application of a series of fragments. To craft a lyric composition, it is essential to apply poetic languaging and to set a right mood.

How to Start a Lyric Essay

Exists no permanent structure for the lyric essay. Each composition represents a simple experiment with form and content. That is why it is difficult to describe each structural and sensing element of a lyric piece. Formally, the structure includes lead-in part, main body section and ending.

To start a lyric essay, an author has to set the general mood for the whole composition, To do it successfully, one needs to choose the appropriate wording. An introductory part has to attract the reader’s attention and encourage to continue reading the composition. It is also important to create an effective thesis. It should clearly describe the main idea of a writer. Apart from that, a writer will need to refer to it throughout the whole piece. Properly compiled thesis secures a 100% success of a composition.

Essay Body Paragraphs

The lyric essay body paragraphs compilation depends on a type of the essay. That is why one should always take it into account. The core body of a prose poem essay should be built with the application of different poetic devices and images. One can apply assonance, alliteration and internal rhyme. A metaphor is an indispensable tool to be used to the main body of prose poem essay type.

The main body of a college essay has to comprise a series of fragments. Here a writer can combine poetry, prose and music. Each paragraph should be separated by epigraph or subtitles. The braided essay should be concentrated on a clear topic. However, an author can apply various sources of info. Here one can present multiple ideas, use quotations, popular sayings and other references.

“Hermit crab” main essay body resembles a product created from another essay. It is a mixture of various genres and art and literary pieces that are used to create something new – a new lyrical composition.

Lyric Essay Conclusion

Lyric essay conclusion has to comprise a summary of whole writing. It should summarise all the ideas presented in a main body of the essay and be a closing element for the composition. By reading a concluding part, an author should clearly understand, what was the piece about. There should be a reference to a thesis. Apart from that, the conclusion should present a logical ending of your writing and create a pleasant feeling in a soul of your target reader.

Lyric Essay Outline

A creation of outline for a lyric essay does not presuppose following of an established pattern. It is impossible to map out a clear structure of a framework, as the form can be variated. However, a writer has to bear in mind the fact that the material should be organised logically and coherently. A text should comprise an introductory part, main body and a conclusion. Due to a biased nature of a lyric essay, it is impossible to establish clear writing rules. It gives space for creativity and imagination, and the author can decide on an outline structure by himself.

Lyric Essay Examples

For members of colleges and universities having to deal with the production of the lyric essay for the first time, it may be challenging to understand the nature of the assignment. Apart from that, one cannot perceive the quality of the essay and grab all the peculiarities by simply consulting rules. For that reasons, a good strategy will be to turn to examples. On the web exists a variety of examples illustrating the form and content of a proper lyric essay.

Be consulting a lyric essay example an author has a chance to see how theory can be applied in practice. Apart from that, one can get inspired and borrow various ideas of writing this kind of composition. It may be difficult, at first glance. But as soon as you try writing a lyric essay, you will enjoy both the process and your final example.

Related Topics

We can write a custom essay

According to Your Specific Requirements

Sorry, but copying text is forbidden on this website. If you need this or any other sample, we can send it to you via email.

Copying is only available for logged-in users

If you need this sample for free, we can send it to you via email

By clicking "SEND", you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We'll occasionally send you account related and promo emails.

We have received your request for getting a sample. Please choose the access option you need:

With a 24-hour delay (you will have to wait for 24 hours) due to heavy workload and high demand - for free

Choose an optimal rate and be sure to get the unlimited number of samples immediately without having to wait in the waiting list

3 Hours Waiting For Unregistered user

Using our plagiarism checker for free you will receive the requested result within 3 hours directly to your email

Jump the queue with a membership plan, get unlimited samples and plagiarism results – immediately!

We have received your request for getting a sample

Only the users having paid subscription get the unlimited number of samples immediately.

How about getting this access immediately?

Or if you need this sample for free, we can send it to you via email.

Your membership has been canceled.

Your Answer Is Very Helpful For Us Thank You A Lot!

Emma Taylor

Hi there! Would you like to get such a paper? How about getting a customized one?

Get access to our huge, continuously updated knowledge base