Modern Lyric Poems: From Poetic Genre to Cognitive Category

Abstract

Literary genres are important concepts for literary scholars and students of literature alike. Yet differences in opinion are common when defining which literary genre a given text fits best. However, my study here takes a step back from that spot to see how critics and other academics can conceptualize a literary genre in the first place. My case study is the modern lyric poem, a well-known literary genre in poetics. The results, never before published, include replies to an informal survey carried out at an international cognitive poetics conference at Osnabrück University in Germany. I begin by discussing handbook definitions and examples named. Then I compare them to results obtained from participants at the academic conference. Results sometimes overlap, aligning with criteria published in handbooks, although there are variations. I consider various reasons why participants might have selected certain examples of the genre, before ending with some suggestions of topics for future research on cognition in poetics.

Keywords

• lyric poems; modern genres; cognitive poetics; categorization theory; cognitive science