Lyric poetry is a type of poetry that expresses personal emotion or meditation. It is typically relatively short and does not primarily tell a story.

The ancient lyric was sung to the lyre; the modern lyric retains the sense of a single voice speaking with intensity about feeling, perception, or thought. Sonnets, odes, elegies, and many free-verse poems fall under the lyric umbrella. The focus is on the speaker’s inner state or on a moment of heightened awareness rather than on external plot. Readers are invited to overhear or to share the emotion.

Lyric poetry can be intimate or public, simple or highly wrought. It ranges from the apparently spontaneous to the elaborately formal. What unites the various forms is the centrality of subjective experience and the concentration of language that such experience seems to demand. Even when the “I” of the poem is fictional, the effect is of a voice speaking from within a moment of feeling or insight.

A poem that exists primarily to voice a state of mind or heart is lyric.