Is there a difference between good lyrics and good poetry? As an avid listener of the singer-songwriter genre and reader of poetry, this question comes as a point of contention when discussing lyrics with fellow writers and musicians. A simplistic answer is that the difference is that poems don’t have any music behind them and song lyrics do, but that doesn’t really delve into the cultural distinctions between the genres.
There are various musical artists that actively try to sculpt their lyrics as though they were poetry - a move that goes against the commercial trope of pop lyrics and suggests a desire for the words to be taken as seriously as literary poetry. Essentially, poetry is part of the literary canon, whilst songs stay in the consumption of popular music. Generally, if songs are discussed in an academic setting, it is often to explore their cultural impact on the literary scene, not looking at the songs themselves as texts. This opposition causes some musicians to have the intention to be considered poets - a title that distinguishes their commitment to the quality of their writing from other musicians.
It is an arbitrary stigma to state that lyrics inherently have less literary merit than poetry in their reception and creation. For lyrics to be regarded as “poetry” becomes a gruelling process of ratification for the musician. The desire to consider lyrics as literature reflects some unfortunate and persistent biases that are detrimental to both poems and songs. This desire presumes that because poems are “literature,” they must be serious, that is, written in forms that reflect obvious mastery of literary mannerisms e.g. rhyme, metric, structure etc.
These cultural rules presume that the value in lyrics is how they reflect literary values and skills. This contention often resides for those unfamiliar with poetic history, a generalised distinction is made: poems are “literary”, made for academia and popular songs are not educational, and therefore, for the uneducated. The biases inherent in such a widespread distinction do a disservice to both poetry and song. By holding poetry to a literary standard, and either granting or denying that standard to song lyrics, we locate the worth of an artistic endeavour in the most superficial qualities of language, ones that are actually peripheral to what makes a poem worthwhile.
There are important differences between lyrics and poems. Words in a poem take place against the context of silence, lyrics take place in the context of a lot of deliberate musical information: melody, rhythm, instrumentation, the quality of the singer’s voice, other qualities of the recording, etc. Without all that musical information, lyrics usually do not function as well, precisely because they were intentionally designed that way. The ways the conditions of that environment affect the construction of the words (refrain, repetition, the ways information that can be communicated musically must be communicated in other ways in a poem, etc.) is where we can begin to locate the main differences between poetry and lyrics.
As for the question of whether poems can function as song lyrics, the answer seems to be, in the right hands, absolutely yes. Just to take a few recent examples, Jason Collett and Eric Moe, have all set poems by contemporary poets to music, with exciting and gorgeous results. These composers recognize, it seems to me, the essential qualities of language in poetry. These musical artists use their considerable skill and sensitivity to design music that moves around and with the poems, never overloading them with musical information or tormenting them into overly strained forms to serve a musical structure - two of the most noticeable qualities of failed musical-poetic collaborations.
To say that this means song lyrics are less literary than poems, or require less skill or intelligence or training or work to create, is patently absurd (and, in the case of rap music, patronising). But, that does not mean that song lyrics are poems. They might sometimes accidentally function like poems when taken out of a musical context, but abstracting lyrics from musical information is misleading and beside the point. It seems far more productive to ask how lyrics in songs relate to musical information, and how poems relate to the silences (cultural and actual) that surround them; to recognize that lyrics and poetry, while different genres with different forces and imperatives, have both more and less in common than we might think, and are endeavours of equal value.
Written by Stephanie Ornithari Roberts
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