Are Lyrics 'Poems Put to Music'?

On poem, lyrics, and a little on bards and the oral tradition

Nov 14, 2024

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Hello Red Cabbage readers,

A friend once told me she wouldn’t follow me on Substack as she didn’t like ‘that sort of thing’: she explicitly meant poetry. That’s fine, everyone is entitled to be wrong about something - rude much - lol. I am joking here, every one is entitled to like what they like and not like what they don’t like. However, it did get me to thinking, especially as I know who her favourite band is and that she knows every single word to every single song, much of which is poetical.

The question that rose in my mind was

Aren’t lyrics poems that have been put to music?

My eldest is a singer/songwriting in her spare time and her lyrics are often very poetical. Obviously there is a format that is stricter in some cases, but so are some forms of poetry. Haiku for example, can’t mess about with that, it either follows the strict format or it is not a Haiku. (Though since I first wrote this sentence months ago I’ve discovered that this is not true and my haiku writing is now flummoxed.)

Unlike my usual rambles I went searching on the internet.

In the Boston review Matthew Zapruder states

is absurd to contend that lyrics inherently have less literary merit than poetry, or are easier to create

And I completely agree. This wasn’t my question really, and didn’t answer what I was asking, so I turned to my eldest who did a song writing degree and came out with a 1st, so you would expect that she knows her stuff. I had a chat with her and picked her brains. Gratuitous mother bragging, find her here.

I asked her, “Are lyrics ‘poems set to music’ (in the main)?”

She said …

Ais: Annoying answer but I would say: they can be, they don’t have to be. I would say lyricism can definitely be argued to be a form of poetry but most lyricists don’t massively identify as poets, the lyric and music are very entangled in a lot of cases so without the music it could be a poem but wouldn’t have the same effect.

(I) Don’t like reading poetry or listening to poetry when it’s on its own because I think that with lyrics the music just adds a lot. So if you you take a dance song, like a club banger that was purely written to make people dance normally the lyrics are like ‘yeah, I’m in the club gonna party, I’m in the club gonna party tonight.’ I’m sure you could call that poetry but I’m sure most poets and poetry audiences wouldn’t enjoy that as spoken word. I think what you said as to lyrics to be poetic, as an adjective as opposed to poetry as a noun more people would agree with that statement. But sure, it’s using words as an art form in a structured format and I think words in a structured format is basically poetry right? But then you get some more very lyric focused artists like Imogen Heap or Joni Mitchell -A Case of You. I would say that is a poem. Or that is on the poem spectrum of just song lyrics on one side and poetry on then other. A case of you you read that and you are ‘that’s a poem’. Music makes it better but it stands as a poem. . But some people might listen to A Case of You and really like it because they like the melody or they like Joni Mitchell’s voice and maybe they wouldn’t enjoy it as much if they were just reading it as lyrics on a page without any other contextual elements, so it’s the kind of thing you could write a dissertation about. But short answer, are lyrics poetry, yeah sure.

Me; so in some respects lyrics can be better than poetry, more depth

Ais: because there are additional contextual elements (music) yes. I don’t think ‘straight ‘ poetry is inferior at all. Just different. Like listening to a solo acoustic version of a song versus a while band recording it. One more complex, not necessarily arguably better.

Then you could say that spoken word poetry has more elements than written word poetry cos you have the delivery of the artist, whether they highlight certain words, whether they use their facial expressions or their body language to put emphasis on certain things. It is a performance of their poem, whereas when you read you are making your own performance of it in your head. Both can be great because with spoken word you get the artists vision but you have to go with their vision, whereas if you are reading a book, a novel, a poem or anything, you add your own experiences and your own lived experience in context to the poem which can bring out things that maybe the author even didn’t think about which any author will say that’s not a bad thing that’s an amazing thing when people find things in your work that you didn’t intend or you weren’t focusing on. That’s really cool.

Lisa O'Hare

said in a piece on

Poetry Pals

I was super lucky to hear Simon Armitage read and do a Q&A in Eccles Library last year. His insights into the precision of truly world class poetry was incredible. He talked on his strong view that lyrics to songs are not poetry. Poetry is a specific art form. Lyricism another. He was reading from his book of his own lyric writing, Never Good with Horses. He didn't dismiss the creative beauty and joy of lyrics, but he was precise in how he differentiated that type of writing from the academic practice of writing poetry.

I don’t agree with Mr Armitage in general, as I feel there is great overlap between the two genres. Why can’t it be both? But I will confess that I don’t have an ‘academic practise of writing poetry’ and actually don’t really understand what that means. I’m fairly sure a lot of lyric writers take great pains and trouble over making sure what they write conveys precisely what they want it to say, just like a lot of us less ‘academic’ poets. In fact the more I write this paragraph the more annoyed I am becoming at a seeming prejudice against non ‘academic’ (in my mind posh and only stuff like sonnets etc) poetry. I’m probably reading far too much into that one word, but it feels elitist. Poetry is SO subjective, as has been demonstrated by my attempt to have poems published, poems which have been rejected by one are snapped up by another: a poem I put out there on a whim that I didn’t particularly think much of, completely non academic, also accepted; my favourite supposedly well crafted ‘academic’ one rejected. Lyrics the same.

In the ‘olden days’ (oo, I feel my age there and sound like my grandmothers) news and stories about the world were passed on by bards, they spun heroic tales of love, war, life and death very often putting them to music. The oral traditions before most could read were the way to disseminate information. Bards tended to wander the land picking up ‘gossip’ and taking the ‘propaganda’ of their sponsor along the way, spreading it to the small folk they encountered. Lyrics or poetical tales made the information easier to remember.

So to wind up this post, finally, after around 10 months of it sitting in drafts, I think some poems would make great lyrics, some lyrics would make great poems, and some of each genre are ~~trash~~ not so good. What are your views?

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