Parting ways …

… Lyric and Lyric – the AGNI blog. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

For most of Western history—from bards singing The Iliad and The Odyssey, to French troubadours, to Shakespearean sonnets, to Dickinson’s ballad stanzas—there was little distinction between a poem and a song; the word “lyric” referred to both, whether the words were spoken, printed or sung. But somewhere in the last hundred years or so, a rift must have opened up between these understandings of “the lyric”—because the kind that appears on the radio no longer bears much resemblance to the kind that appears on the page.