A large share of Romantic lyric poetry, and a large share of the best of it, doesnot fall under such well-defined categories as “sonnet” or eventhe looser genre called “ode.” Wordsworth and Coleridge, as wesaw, wrote poems of various lengths called “Lines” (usually with adescriptive subtitle), Coleridge wrote “Monodies,” Shelley wrote“Stanzas,” several poets wrote deliberate fragments, and so on.Many Romantic poems were called “songs” and were even set tomusic, but songs come in many shapes and sizes. Some poems are very short– a couplet or quatrain – while others, such as Coleridge’s“conversation” poems or Wordsworth’s “TinternAbbey,” are fairly long. They may or may not come grouped into stanzas orgraced with rhyme. The main reason we call all of them “lyric” ismerely genealogical, as we trace their ancestry back to songs sung by Greeks tothe lyre, and that fact is of little help in categorizing them in 1800 or today.A good handbook of literary terms defines “lyric” as “Abrief subjective poem strongly marked by imagination, melody, and emotion, andcreating a single, unified impression.” I have no better definition tooffer, and yet I have sometimes come across poems that I would like to call“lyric” but that do not strike me as very imaginative, melodious,emotional, or even subjective. It might be simpler, then, to retain“lyric” as the residual category after we separate out narrativeand dramatic verse, which are more readily defined, or to enumerate itssubgenres with a miscellaneous addendum: “lyric poems include odes,sonnets, and the like.” Neither approach is very satisfactory, but theyneedn’t trouble us as long as we have a rough idea of what we are talkingabout.