The literary importance of the emotive and plot structures and principles discussed in the preceding chapters would appear to be confined to explicitly narrative literature – stories, plays, novels, epics. This is hardly a narrow scope. Narrative literature is vast and there is no reason to expect that an account of explicit narratives could be extended to another area of literature. On the other hand, such an extension would give greater force to the initial account and would further its research program in valuable ways. In the following pages, I shall argue that we can in fact extend these structures and principles to lyric poetry. Indeed, in the conclusion to this chapter, I shall argue that the preceding theory can be extended even beyond literature to aspects of our ordinary lives, such as religious belief, and that the narrative study of lyric poetry helps us to see this.

LYRIC POEMS AS IMPLICIT PLOTS: THE NARRATIVE HYPOTHESIS

More exactly, we tend to think of narrative and nonnarrative verbal art as sharply distinct. However, the structure of plots and the universal features of lyric poetry indicate that this is a misconception. In particular, lyric poems are commonly set off against narrative, opposed to it. For example, one standard handbook defines a lyric poem as “A poem, brief and discontinuous, emphasizing sound and pictoral imagery rather than narrative” (Frye, Baker, and Perkins 268). However, I shall argue that lyric poems are not separate from narrative.