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27-455: In one of his surviving fragments (fragment 76), the Greek lyricist poet Pindar wrote of Athens: "City of light, with thy violet crown, beloved of the poets, thou art the bulwark of Greece." The climate of Attica is characterised by low humidity and a high percentage of dust in the air, which make sunsets display hues of violet and purple and the surrounding mountains often appear immersed in

54-570: A U.S. federal court has ordered LiveUniverse, a network of websites run by MySpace co-founder Brad Greenspan , to cease operating four sites offering unlicensed song lyrics. Lyrics can be studied from an academic perspective. For example, some lyrics can be considered a form of social commentary . Lyrics often contain political, social, and economic themes—as well as aesthetic elements—and so can communicate culturally significant messages. These messages can be explicit, or implied through metaphor or symbolism. Lyrics can also be analyzed with respect to

81-484: A close (featuring a cadence ); in German Vordersatz - Fortspinnung - Epilog . For example: In the lyrics of popular music a "shifter" is a word, often a pronoun , "where reference varies according to who is speaking, when and where", such as "I", "you", "my", "our". For example, who is the "my" of " My Generation "? As of 2021 , there are many websites featuring song lyrics. This offering, however,

108-486: A personal enemy, an art at which Archilochus , the earliest known Greek lyric poet, excelled. The themes of Greek lyric include "politics, war, sports, drinking, money, youth, old age, death, the heroic past, the gods," and hetero- and homosexual love . In the 3rd century BC, the encyclopedic movement at Alexandria produced a canon of the nine melic poets : Alcaeus , Alcman , Anacreon , Bacchylides , Ibycus , Pindar , Sappho , Simonides , and Stesichorus . Only

135-423: A publication now in the public domain :  Wood, James , ed. (1907). The Nuttall Encyclopædia . London and New York: Frederick Warne. {{ cite encyclopedia }} : Missing or empty |title= ( help ) Greek lyric Greek lyric is the body of lyric poetry written in dialects of Ancient Greek . It is primarily associated with the early 7th to the early 5th centuries BC, sometimes called

162-925: A purple haze. In Geoffrey Trease 's novel, The Crown of Violet , the name is explained as referring to the mauve -tinted marble of the Acropolis hill. According to the History Center in Austin, Texas , the phrase first appeared in The Austin Daily Statesman (now The Austin American-Statesman ) on May 5, 1890. It was long believed to have originated in O. Henry 's story "Tictocq: The Great French Detective, In Austin", published in his collection of short stories The Rolling Stone published October 27, 1894. In chapter 2 of Tictocq , O. Henry writes: "The drawing-rooms of one of

189-569: A small sampling of lyric poetry from Archaic Greece , the period when it first flourished, survives. For example, the poems of Sappho are said to have filled nine papyrus rolls in the Library of Alexandria , with the first book alone containing more than 1,300 lines of verse. Today, only one of Sappho's poems exists intact, with fragments from other sources that would scarcely fill a chapbook . Greek poetry meters are based on patterns of long and short syllables (in contrast to English verse, which

216-507: Is controversial, since some sites include copyrighted lyrics offered without the holder's permission. The U.S. Music Publishers Association (MPA), which represents sheet music companies, launched a legal campaign against such websites in December 2005. The MPA's president, Lauren Keiser, said the free lyrics web sites are "completely illegal" and wanted some website operators jailed. Lyrics licenses could be obtained worldwide through one of

243-438: Is determined by stress), and lyric poetry is characterized by a great variety of metrical forms. Apart from the shift between long and short syllables, stress must be considered when reading Greek poetry. The interplay between the metric "shifts", the stressed syllables and caesuras is an integral part of the poetry. It allows the poet to stress certain words and shape the meaning of the poem. There are two main divisions within

270-782: Is particularly common with hymns and ballads ). Possible classifications proliferate (under anthem , ballad , blues , carol , folk song , hymn , libretto , lied , lullaby , march , praise song , round , spiritual ). Nursery rhymes may be songs, or doggerel : the term does not imply a distinction. The ghazal is a sung form that is considered primarily poetic. See also rapping , roots of hip hop music . Analogously, verse drama might normally be judged (at its best) as poetry , but not consisting of poems (see dramatic verse ). In Baroque music, melodies and their lyrics were prose. Rather than paired lines they consist of rhetorical sentences or paragraphs consisting of an opening gesture, an amplification (often featuring sequence ), and

297-416: Is set to music , to the point that any distinction becomes untenable. This is perhaps recognised in the way popular songs have lyrics . However, the verse may pre-date its tune (in the way that " Rule Britannia " was set to music, and " And did those feet in ancient time " has become the hymn "Jerusalem"), or the tune may be lost over time but the words survive, matched by a number of different tunes (this

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324-478: Is the product of the political, social and intellectual milieu of the Greek polis ("city-state"). Much of Greek lyric is occasional poetry , composed for public or private performance by a soloist or chorus to mark particular occasions. The symposium ("drinking party") was one setting in which lyric poems were performed. "Lyric" was sometimes sung to the accompaniment of either a string instrument (particularly

351-518: The Belt of Venus . The phrase is also said to be connected to the moonlight towers of Austin. Another explanation is that, during the 19th century, residents began to call Austin the "Athens of the South" for its university. With his sly reference to the poetry of Pindar, O. Henry may have been satirizing Austin's ambitious claim of a cultural link to ancient Athens . This article incorporates text from

378-529: The Greek λυρικός ( lurikós ), the adjectival form of lyre . It first appeared in English in the mid-16th century in reference to the Earl of Surrey 's translations of Petrarch and to his own sonnets . Greek lyric poetry had been defined by the manner in which it was sung accompanied by the lyre or cithara , as opposed to the chanted formal epics or the more passionate elegies accompanied by

405-604: The flute . The personal nature of many of the verses of the Nine Lyric Poets led to the present sense of " lyric poetry " but the original Greek sense of "lyric poetry"—"poetry accompanied by the lyre" i.e. "words set to music"—eventually led to its use as "lyrics", first attested in Stainer and Barrett's 1876 Dictionary of Musical Terms . Stainer and Barrett used the word as a singular substantive: " Lyric , poetry or blank verse intended to be set to music and sung". By

432-560: The lyre or kithara ) or a wind instrument (most often the reed pipe called aulos ). Whether the accompaniment was a string or wind instrument, the term for such accompanied lyric was melic poetry (from the Greek word for "song" melos ). Lyric could also be sung without any instrumental accompaniment. This latter form is called meter and it is recited rather than sung, strictly speaking. Modern surveys of "Greek lyric" often include relatively short poems composed for similar purposes or circumstances that were not strictly " song lyrics " in

459-529: The " Lyric Age of Greece ", but continued to be written into the Hellenistic and Imperial periods. Lyric is one of three broad categories of poetry in classical antiquity , along with drama and epic , according to the scheme of the "natural forms of poetry" developed by Goethe in the early nineteenth century. (Drama is considered a form of poetry here because both tragedy and comedy were written in verse in ancient Greece.) Culturally, Greek lyric

486-477: The 1930s, the present use of the plurale tantum "lyrics" had begun; it has been standard since the 1950s for many writers. The singular form "lyric" is still used to mean the complete words to a song by authorities such as Alec Wilder, Robert Gottlieb, and Stephen Sondheim. However, the singular form is also commonly used to refer to a specific line (or phrase) within a song's lyrics. The differences between poem and song may become less meaningful where verse

513-423: The dead, exhort soldiers to valor, and offer religious devotion in the forms of hymns , paeans , and dithyrambs . Partheneia , "maiden-songs," were sung by choruses of maidens at festivals. Love poems praise the beloved, express unfulfilled desire, proffer seductions, or blame the former lover for a breakup. In this last mood, love poetry might blur into invective , a poetic attack aimed at insulting or shaming

540-755: The epode a different form. Song lyrics Lyrics are words that make up a song , usually consisting of verses and choruses . The writer of lyrics is a lyricist . The words to an extended musical composition such as an opera are, however, usually known as a " libretto " and their writer, as a " librettist ". Rap songs and grime contain rap lyrics (often with a variation of rhyming words) that are meant to be spoken rhythmically rather than sung. The meaning of lyrics can either be explicit or implicit. Some lyrics are abstract, almost unintelligible, and, in such cases, their explication emphasizes form , articulation , meter , and symmetry of expression. The word lyric derives via Latin lyricus from

567-423: The meters of ancient Greek poetry: lyric and non-lyric meters. "Lyric meters (literally, meters sung to a lyre ) are usually less regular than non-lyric meters. The lines are made up of feet of different kinds, and can be of varying lengths. Some lyric meters were used for monody (solo songs), such as some of the poems of Sappho and Alcaeus ; others were used for choral dances, such as the choruses of tragedies and

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594-726: The modern sense, such as elegies and iambics . The Greeks themselves did not include elegies nor iambus within melic poetry, since they had different metres and different musical instruments. The Edinburgh Companion to Ancient Greece and Rome offers the following clarification: "'melic' is a musical definition, 'elegy' is a metrical definition, whereas 'iambus' refers to a genre and its characteristics subject matter. (...) The fact that these categories are artificial and potentially misleading should prompt us to approach Greek lyric poetry with an open mind, without preconceptions about what 'type' of poetry we are reading." Greek lyric poems celebrate athletic victories ( epinikia ) , commemorate

621-573: The most magnificent private residences in Austin are ablaze of lights. Carriages line the streets in front, and from gate to doorway is spread a velvet carpet, on which the delicate feet of the guests may tread. The occasion is the entrée into society of one of the fairest buds in the City of the Violet Crown." The phrase is generally thought to refer to the atmospheric phenomenon more commonly known as

648-481: The music would have made for a much more complicated critical feat. A 2009 report published by McAfee found that, in terms of potential exposure to malware , lyrics-related searches and searches containing the word "free" are the most likely to have risky results from search engines, both in terms of average risk of all results, and maximum risk of any result. Beginning in late 2014, Google changed its search results pages to include song lyrics. When users search for

675-408: The sense of unity (or lack of unity) it has with its supporting music. Analysis based on tonality and contrast are particular examples. Former Oxford Professor of Poetry Christopher Ricks famously published Dylan's Visions of Sin , an in-depth and characteristically Ricksian analysis of the lyrics of Bob Dylan ; Ricks gives the caveat that to have studied the poetry of the lyrics in tandem with

702-456: The two aggregators: LyricFind and Musixmatch . The first company to provide licensed lyrics was Yahoo! , quickly followed by MetroLyrics . Several lyric websites are providing licensed lyrics, such as SongMeanings and LyricWiki (defunct as of 2020). Many competing lyrics web sites are still offering unlicensed content, causing challenges around the legality and accuracy of lyrics. In an attempt to crack down unlicensed lyrics web sites,

729-632: The victory odes of Pindar ." The lyric meters' families are the Ionic , the Aeolic (based on the choriamb , which can generate varied kinds of verse, such as the glyconian or the Sapphic stanza ), and the Dactylo-epitrite. The Doric choral songs were composed in complex triadic forms of strophe, antistrophe, and epode, with the first two parts of the triad having the same metrical pattern, and

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