Lyric Poetry Isn’t Fiction

Response to an argument that lyric poems are fictions, short stories if you like, and can be assimilated to fictional works: 

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Your argument dangles precipitously on the broken thread of conflation of two senses of fiction: fiction as simply what’s made up; and fiction as a distinct genre of literature with characteristics that mark its distinctiveness and differentiate it from lyric poetry, which has its own unique markers. 

So of course there aren’t two types of lyric poems in the forms you propose. What you miss in your mistaken view—that what’s made up = fiction= lyric poems— is that the inspiration or genesis of poems is irrelevant. What counts is the poem itself, its aesthetic autonomy. On your conflation, all genres of literature are fictions. Your argument loses itself in blurring these two senses of fiction.

Lyric poems are expressions of the poet's apprehension of whatever has inspired the poem. It’s the recreation of the inspiration as apprehended, which makes any distinction between real or imagined irrelevant.

Lyric poems as apprehension don’t conform to traditional narrative flow or adhere to strict rules of logic, but this does not make them purely fictional. They attempt to capture a particular emotional state or experience in words, rather than a deliberate fabrication of a peopled world marked by events and characters’ interactions and immersion in those events.

Lyric poems are often written in the first person, but whatever the point of view, they evoke a direct connection between poet's voice and reader, which intimate relationship is qualitatively different from readers’ relationship in most fiction to the thick quality of the whole of events, complexity of the characters, elaborated setting and all their evolving inter-relatedness. 

Poems are the articulation of instants of experience, real or imagined. Poets use their creative license to embellish or transform these instants into the poetic, marked by a kind of inward thrust. Lyric poems drive in on themselves to a theme that synthesizes form and meaning, which can be approximated by a concise paraphrase. Fictions project worlds. They go outwards in their relative expansiveness.

To expand on these differences, the genre of literary fiction is characterized by a strong narrative structure and the projection of a beginning, middle, and end, even if not always presented in that order. Plots are often complex, with multiple storylines and characters, and may involve developed themes of conflict, resolution, and character development as embedded in the stories. Lyric poetry focuses on expressing emotions and ideas, with a less narrative-driven approach.

In fiction, characters are often complex and multi-dimensional, with distinct personalities, motivations, and flaws. They may undergo significant changes over the course of the story, and their actions and decisions have consequences for the plot. Lyric poetry doesn’t have these elements. 

Fiction is rich in characters’ dialogue, which shows how they are of their worlds and which elaborates on and moves the story. In lyric poetry, dialogue is infrequent. The focus is on the speaker's singular subjective reaction to the source of his attention.

Fiction often has a well-defined setting playing a significant role in the story, both to particularize time and place and to show characters’ relation to them, to show, as noted, how they’re of their world. Poetry goes to the internal landscape of the speaker, which is to say, the  apprehension.  

Lyric poetry tends to use unconventional language, often in syntactically complex ways. Not for nothing is the language of fiction prose, since prose is a gateway to what it describes so as not to obtrude on it. In poetry, language repeats itself in all kinds of ways, is charged and dense, is rhythmic often metric. In a word, in poetry language is, well, poetic. It’s not just a means to what it describes. It’s cardinal in the poem.