Topic summary
Greek lyric poet
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Greek lyric.
Background
Modern surveys of "Greek lyric" often include relatively short poems composed for similar purposes or circumstances that were not strictly "song lyrics" in 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."