I don’t think I think of lyric poems as necessarily beautiful and expressive communication of subtle paraphrasable ideas, though some are. Take Wallace Stevens for example. All good lyric poems in virtue of their nature drive to an articulable unity formed by their means. I tend to think of them more as the illumination of a slice or an aspect of experience that can be analogized to a soliloquy about it. They’re a movement that builds up meaning as it proceeds and finally amounts to a coherent poetic whole.
Most broadly, a poem is any group of words coherent from first word to last set in broken lines written with poetic intention.
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