Poetry vs. Lyrics

On their face, poetry and lyrics seem to be the same thing. They both use fractured English to convey a feeling, tell a story, or show a scene. They both can rhyme (though lyrics tend to do that far more). It seems the only difference is that lyrics have music as a background.

In reality, lyrics and poetry are different from each other down to their core. As I mentioned when I first started this foray into poetry, lyrics are the essence of writing and poetry is condensed writing.

Lyrics can tell a story, but it will be in the sparsest words possible. Lyrics would be like "She flew around the world/Looked for something pure/She came home with an answer/But she was never sure." This is the beginning of a story. It contains all the necessary parts: character, setting, action, plot. It just doesn't have a whole lot of it. There also isn't much to grab on to, either. No matter how much you study those words, you can never know what the full story is because there just isn't enough material. That is why they are the essence of writing.

Now, if lyrics were written alone, they would just be crappy poetry. It's weak writing with lots of repetition and not a whole lot going on (the standard song has about 12 unique lines in it). What makes lyrics acceptable is that they are not alone. They come with music, which is just as integral to the writing as the words.

Music is also meant to be performed. In this aspect, lyrics are similar to spoken poetry, where the aural experience takes precedence and can allow for less-than-stellar meaning.

On a final note, I want to say that there are several definitions of lyrics. One definition is that lyrics are any words that are spoken with music. Another definition is that lyrics are a specific form of writing (the essence of writing). I have been using the latter definition. As a result, that means that a song could have words accompanying it that are incredibly deep and dense. Such an example would be more akin to poetry than lyrics.