Settings

Every category is collapsed by default — tap to expand.

Visual theme

Fonts, palette, and the look of tablets & engraved text.

Layout ratio

How Lyrichord shapes the writing area on this device.

Drum rhythm pattern

Overlay a metric feel on the beat. Currently: Auto (genre).

Replaces the hi-hat / kick feel so lyrics play against a chosen classical or groove pattern (iambic, gallop, triplet, etc.). Also nudges the lyric generator toward matching meter.

Vocal melody rhythm

Stress pattern for the sung line. Currently: Auto (genre).

Shapes which syllables land on the strong beat and how long each note holds — independent of the drum groove. Pick iambic for a heartbeat lilt, dactyl for waltzing storytelling, triplet for a rolling 12/8 feel, etc.

Rhymes

Controls the pool of rhymes the auto-generator can pick from.

Poet's voice

Auto-pick, blend named poets, or learn from what you write.

Your own poets
Random poet — a different writer is picked for every generated line.
William Shakespeare · 1590s
iambic pentameter, courtly imagery, wit, love/mortality couplets
Emily Dickinson · 1860s
hymn meter, dashes, tiny domestic images opening onto eternity
Walt Whitman · 1850s
sprawling free verse, cataloguing, ecstatic democratic self
Edgar Allan Poe · 1840s
gothic gloom, hypnotic internal rhyme, refrains, dread and beauty
Robert Frost · 1910s
plainspoken rural New England, quiet metaphysics, meter that hides itself
Langston Hughes · 1920s
blues rhythm, Harlem streets, dignity and weariness in plain speech
Maya Angelou · 1970s
resilient, incantatory, spirit-forward, refrain-driven affirmation
Sylvia Plath · 1960s
confessional, sharp domestic surrealism, mortality under fluorescent light
Allen Ginsberg · 1950s
long Whitmanic breath-lines, howled ecstasy, urban Buddhist rage
T.S. Eliot · 1920s
modernist fragments, dry irony, fog and evenings, literary allusion
William Blake · 1790s
visionary songs of innocence and experience, tigers and lambs, mystical symmetry
John Keats · 1810s
lush sensuous odes, autumn ripeness, beauty aching into death
Lord Byron · 1810s
romantic swagger, satirical bite, seas and exile and doomed lovers
Percy Bysshe Shelley · 1810s
revolutionary wind, sublime cloud and wave, radiant abstractions
William Wordsworth · 1800s
quiet walker's awe, memory of childhood in nature, humble diction
Elizabeth Barrett Browning · 1840s
devoted love sonnets, spiritual counting of the ways, tender resolve
Rainer Maria Rilke · 1900s
quiet German awe, angels and inward hush, addressing the unseen
Pablo Neruda · 1930s
sensual odes to ordinary things, tomatoes and salt and dark hair
Federico García Lorca · 1920s
Andalusian duende, moon and knives, gypsy grief in flamenco cadence
Charles Bukowski · 1970s
barroom plainspoken grit, cheap wine, horses, tired honesty
e.e. cummings · 1920s
lowercase, broken syntax, spring and small hands, tender oddity
Wallace Stevens · 1930s
philosophical shimmer, blue guitars, imagination shaping reality
Elizabeth Bishop · 1950s
precise quiet observation, fish and maps, tact and losses
Mary Oliver · 1990s
attentive walks, geese and grass, humble sacramental noticing
Seamus Heaney · 1970s
Irish bog and turf, spade and language, muscular quiet music
Dylan Thomas · 1940s
Welsh bardic thunder, seas and green fuses, ecstatic elegy
W.B. Yeats · 1910s
Irish mythic, gyres and swans, aging desire, embroidered heavens
Gwendolyn Brooks · 1950s
Bronzeville portraits, cool boys, tight economical rhymes with real streets
Rumi · 1250s
Sufi ecstatic love, wine and beloved, longing as prayer, whirling metaphors
Hafiz · 1380s
Persian mystical playfulness, tavern of the divine, joyful drunk devotion
Matsuo Bashō · 1680s
haiku brevity, single seasonal image, cicada and moon and old pond
Li Bai · 740s
Tang wine and moon, mountain solitude, exile's cheerful melancholy
Sappho · 600s BCE
Aegean lyric fragments, desire that shakes the body, invocations to Aphrodite
Homer · 800s BCE
epic hexameter grandeur, wine-dark sea, epithets, heroes and gods
Dante Alighieri · 1300s
terza rima descent, moral vision, midway through the dark wood
John Milton · 1660s
epic Latinate grandeur, fallen angels, cosmic sonorous blank verse
John Donne · 1610s
metaphysical conceits, compasses and fleas, arguing with God and lovers
Christina Rossetti · 1860s
Victorian devotional-sensual lyric, goblins and grief, quiet renunciation
Robert Burns · 1780s
Scots vernacular, mice and roses and drams, warm folk song rhythm
Alexander Pushkin · 1830s
Russian romantic elegance, sleighs and duels, ironic tender formality
Anna Akhmatova · 1940s
Russian stoic grief, queue outside the prison, dignified pared-back lyric
Bertolt Brecht · 1930s
cabaret bite, plain political ballad, cool ironic report from the gutter
Kahlil Gibran · 1920s
prophet parables, children and marriage, gentle mystic aphorism
Ocean Vuong · 2010s
queer diasporic tenderness, mother and gunfire, lyrical fragmented lines
Warsan Shire · 2010s
diasporic body and home, migration and mothers, incantatory second-person
Rupi Kaur · 2010s
short broken lines, healing and body and love, lowercase intimate
Bob Dylan · 1960s
surreal folk imagery, tumbling internal rhyme, prophetic street sermon
David Bowie · 1970s
glam cinematic, aliens and starmen, cut-up phrases, glamorous alienation
Leonard Cohen · 1970s
liturgical low croon, sex and God and broken hallelujah
Joni Mitchell · 1970s
watercolor observation, jazz-tinged confession, both sides now clarity
Paul Simon · 1970s
literate everyman detail, gentle rhythmic wit, walking through cities
Paul McCartney · 1960s
melodic optimistic vignette, warm domestic hooks, singable simplicity
John Lennon · 1970s
plainspoken utopian ache, dream and imagine, biting introspection
Mick Jagger · 1970s
swaggering blues drawl, satisfaction and satire, sexy sneer
Freddie Mercury · 1970s
operatic theatrical bombast, mock-grand storytelling, campy grandeur
Bruce Springsteen · 1980s
cinematic American highway, factories and Mary, working-class romance
Tom Waits · 1980s
growl of rain-slick alleys, junkyard piano, carnival grotesque
Nick Cave · 1990s
gothic biblical narrative, murder ballads, tender apocalyptic hush
Patti Smith · 1970s
punk-poet incantation, Rimbaud on the Bowery, holy rock feral
Lou Reed · 1970s
deadpan NYC street portrait, junkies and drag queens, plainspoken cool
Neil Young · 1970s
fragile plaintive drawl, harvest moon and rust, homely mythic America
Stevie Nicks · 1970s
witchy twilight romance, gypsies and gold dust, mystical heartbreak
Prince · 1980s
erotic purple funk, spiritual sensual double-entendre, ecstatic falsetto imagery
Michael Jackson · 1980s
hook-driven urgent pop, dancefloor plea, thriller cinematic tension
Madonna · 1980s
sleek pop provocation, material and holy, radio-ready confession
Kate Bush · 1980s
literary fever-dream art-pop, Wuthering ghosts, running up hills
Björk · 1990s
elemental Icelandic wonder, glaciers and neurons, tender cosmic weirdness
Elliott Smith · 1990s
whispered fragile confession, needle in the hay, quiet self-lacerating tenderness
Jeff Buckley · 1990s
aching soaring lyric of last goodbye, mojo pin, dockside religious yearning
Radiohead / Thom Yorke · 2000s
alienated modern dread, glitchy pastoral paranoia, elliptical hush
PJ Harvey · 1990s
muscular blues-punk imagery, rid of me, dry English gothic
Fiona Apple · 2000s
piano-driven scorched confession, wordy jazzy fury, careful strange rhymes
Joanna Newsom · 2000s
harp-and-thesaurus folk epic, archaic lexicon, dense internal rhyme
Sufjan Stevens · 2000s
hushed banjo confession, states and saints, biblical whispered wonder
Bon Iver / Justin Vernon · 2010s
cabin falsetto, snow and static, cryptic longing in blurred phonetics
Taylor Swift · 2010s
specific narrative diaristic pop, cardigans and scarves, bridge-catharsis
Phoebe Bridgers · 2020s
sad indie deadpan, funerals and skeletons, tender ironic confession
Mitski · 2020s
shivering diaristic longing, small bones and big feelings, ache made small
Lana Del Rey · 2010s
cinematic Americana melancholy, Hollywood and heartbreak, slow-burn glamour
Frank Ocean · 2010s
queer R&B intimacy, cars and Fords and forrest gump, half-spoken confessions
Kendrick Lamar · 2010s
layered rap narrative, Compton parables, moral swirl and shifting voice
Nas · 1990s
cinematic Queensbridge storytelling, precise street reportage, cerebral bars
Jay-Z · 2000s
cool boardroom hustle, Brooklyn to Barclays, punchline swagger
Tupac Shakur · 1990s
impassioned Black revolutionary lyricism, roses from concrete, fierce tender rage
The Notorious B.I.G. · 1990s
Brooklyn cinematic hustle, deep charismatic detail, mafioso storytelling
Missy Elliott · 2000s
playful futuristic bounce, weird onomatopoeia, confident sexual freedom
Lauryn Hill · 1990s
soulful reggae-hip-hop wisdom, doo-wop and scripture, moral warmth
André 3000 · 2000s
elastic Southern surrealism, Polaroid and love-below, playful genre-bending bars
MF DOOM · 2000s
densely internal-rhymed comic-book villainy, mask on, absurdist multisyllabic wit
Kurt Cobain · 1990s
grunge slurred plea, teen spirit dispatches, ironic tender howl
Morrissey · 1980s
arch English melodrama, cemetery gates and celibacy, witty maudlin sneer
Robert Smith (The Cure) · 1980s
gothic pop lovelorn, Friday I'm in love and rain, mascara-smeared tenderness
Ian Curtis (Joy Division) · 1980s
clinical post-punk gloom, love will tear us apart, spare doomed dispatch
Björn Ulvaeus (ABBA) · 1970s
Swedish pop precision, waterloo and Fernando, joyful cinematic heartbreak
Kris Kristofferson · 1970s
Sunday-morning coming down, drifter's tender regret, plainspoken country ache
Willie Nelson · 1970s
outlaw country warmth, on the road and blue eyes, philosophical drawl
Johnny Cash · 1960s
black-clad train-rhythm baritone parable, prisons and rivers, moral gravity
Hank Williams · 1950s
honky-tonk lonesome, tears in beer, plain devastating country twang
Merle Haggard · 1970s
working-class country dignity, Muskogee and Mama Tried, weathered honesty
Dolly Parton · 1970s
warm Appalachian storytelling, coats of many colors, plain gleaming sentiment
Woody Guthrie · 1940s
dust-bowl folk balladry, this land is your land, plainspoken worker
Pete Seeger · 1960s
communal folk singalong, turn turn turn, hopeful protest chorus
Joan Baez · 1960s
clear folk soprano witness, diamonds and rust, ethical tender reportage
Nina Simone · 1960s
smoldering civil-rights blues, Mississippi Goddam, dignified fury and jazz
Enheduanna · 2300s BCE
Sumerian priestess hymns to Inanna, cosmic praise, earliest named author
Ptahhotep · 2400s BCE
Old Kingdom Egyptian instruction, sober fatherly maxims on justice and speech
Gilgamesh poet (anonymous) · 2000s BCE
Mesopotamian epic, cedar forests and Enkidu, mortality and friendship
Hesiod · 700s BCE
archaic Greek didactic, Muses on Helicon, works and days and stern gods
Archilochus · 600s BCE
biting Ionian iambic, tossed shield and mercenary wit, personal invective
Alcaeus of Mytilene · 600s BCE
Lesbian civic lyric, wine and politics, ship-of-state under storm
Anacreon · 500s BCE
playful wine-and-love Ionian song, garlanded old man teasing Eros
Simonides of Ceos · 500s BCE
grave Greek epitaph, Thermopylae terse elegy, sculptural sorrow
Pindar · 400s BCE
grand Theban victory ode, gods and athletes, dense soaring metaphor
Bacchylides · 400s BCE
graceful Greek choral, mythic dithyramb, warmer sunlit cousin to Pindar
Aeschylus · 400s BCE
tragic Athenian thunder, Furies and Prometheus, cosmic moral weight
Sophocles · 400s BCE
measured Attic tragedy, Antigone's law, doomed clarity of the polis
Euripides · 400s BCE
restless psychological tragedy, Medea's rage, humane and skeptical
Aristophanes · 400s BCE
Attic comic obscenity, frogs and clouds, ribald political satire
Theognis of Megara · 500s BCE
aristocratic elegiac counsel, bitter about the new rich, drinking-party gnomes
Solon · 500s BCE
Athenian lawgiver's elegies, civic warning, measured public reason in verse
Callimachus · 200s BCE
Alexandrian polished miniatures, learned wit, small pure book over big epic
Theocritus · 200s BCE
pastoral idyll, shepherds contesting, sunlit Sicilian sweetness
Apollonius of Rhodes · 200s BCE
Hellenistic Argonautic epic, Medea's love-agony, learned mythic voyage
Meleager of Gadara · 100s BCE
Greek erotic epigram, Garland anthology, garlanded love and quick grief
Ennius · 100s BCE
early Latin Annales, hexameter Rome-founding, rough grand archaic
Lucretius · 50s BCE
Epicurean cosmic didactic, De Rerum Natura, atoms swerving into wonder
Catullus · 50s BCE
Roman lyric intimacy, Lesbia's sparrow, tender and obscene in the same breath
Virgil · 20s BCE
stately Roman epic, arms and the man, pious sorrow under imperial calm
Horace · 20s BCE
Roman odes of measured joy, carpe diem, Sabine farm and polished wit
Ovid · 10s BCE
witty Metamorphoses shape-shift, exile letters, sly erotic mythography
Propertius · 20s BCE
Roman elegiac obsession, Cynthia's cruelty, torchlit erotic dread
Tibullus · 20s BCE
gentle Roman elegy, pastoral peace, tender resigned love
Sulpicia · 20s BCE
rare Roman woman elegist, frank erotic confession, patrician indignation
Statius · 80s
Flavian epic Thebaid, dark mythic Rome, dense mannered grandeur
Martial · 80s
Roman epigram sting, bathhouse satire, punchline cruelty and street portraits
Juvenal · 100s
Roman satiric fury, bread and circuses, savage moral disgust
Persius · 50s
cramped Stoic Roman satire, moral wince, dense difficult diatribe
Lucan · 60s
Neronian civil-war epic Pharsalia, republican grief, rhetorical fireworks
Claudian · 400s
late-antique Latin panegyric, rape of Proserpina, dying-empire grandeur
Ausonius · 300s
Gallo-Roman polished occasional verse, Moselle river, professorial charm
Alcman · 600s BCE
Spartan choral partheneia, maiden dancers under stars, quiet nocturne
Ibycus · 500s BCE
Greek erotic lyric, cranes of Ibycus, torch of desire in spring gardens
Stesichorus · 500s BCE
grand narrative Sicilian lyric, retracted Helen, chorally staged myth
Corinna of Tanagra · 500s BCE
Boeotian mythic lyric, local heroines, plainer alternative to Pindar
Nossis of Locri · 200s BCE
Hellenistic woman epigrammatist, dedications and daughters, Sapphic lineage
Erinna · 300s BCE
brief Greek woman elegist, Distaff, girlhood friend mourned in hexameter
Antipater of Sidon · 100s BCE
Hellenistic epigram, seven wonders, ruins and epitaphs and grave wit
Palladas of Alexandria · 300s
late-antique pagan epigram, weary irony, dying gods and bad marriages
Nonnus of Panopolis · 400s
late Greek Dionysiaca, baroque mythic overflow, ecstatic hexameter torrent
Musaeus (late) · 500s
late Greek Hero and Leander, moonlit swim, tender erotic doom
Quintus of Smyrna · 300s
post-Homeric epic, fall of Troy continued, sober imitation of the Iliad
Colluthus · 500s
late Greek Rape of Helen, small mythic ekphrasis, mannered elegance
Boethius · 500s
Consolation of Philosophy, Lady Philosophy in prison, meter alternating with prose
Prudentius · 400s
Christian Latin Psychomachia, allegorical virtues battling vices, hymn-like fervor
Venantius Fortunatus · 500s
Merovingian Latin hymnist, Vexilla Regis, courtly cross-praise
Caedmon · 600s
earliest Old English Christian hymn, cowherd's vision, plain creation praise
Cynewulf · 800s
Old English runic-signed religious verse, Christ and Elene, sober devotion
Beowulf poet (anonymous) · 900s
Anglo-Saxon alliterative epic, mead-hall and monster, grim heroic elegy
Deor poet (anonymous) · 900s
Old English lament with refrain, that passed away, so may this
Wanderer poet (anonymous) · 900s
Old English elegy of exile, frozen sea and vanished lord, ubi sunt hush
Seafarer poet (anonymous) · 900s
Old English sea-longing, cuckoo and cold spray, ascetic pilgrim ache
Alcuin of York · 790s
Carolingian Latin verse letters, learned schoolroom warmth, elegy for a nightingale
Notker the Stammerer · 890s
St Gall sequence hymnist, syllabic Latin praise, monastic melodic prose-verse
Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim · 960s
Ottonian nun's Latin drama and epic, virgin martyrs, chaste bold voice
Sedulius Scottus · 850s
Irish exile at Carolingian court, sly Latin epigram, wine and patronage
Marbod of Rennes · 1090s
eleventh-century Latin, jeweled Lapidary, moralized stones
Hildegard of Bingen · 1150s
Rhineland visionary Latin hymnody, greenness and viriditas, ecstatic mystic praise
Peter Abelard · 1130s
twelfth-century Latin planctus, David's laments, philosopher-lover's grief
Bernard of Cluny · 1140s
medieval Latin De Contemptu Mundi, thundering apocalyptic hexameter
Walter of Châtillon · 1180s
twelfth-century Latin satire, Alexandreis epic, biting clerical wit
Archpoet · 1160s
wandering Latin goliard, Confession, tavern and dice and mock repentance
Carmina Burana poets (anonymous) · 1200s
goliardic Latin/German drinking songs, spring lust, wheel of fortune
Bertran de Born · 1180s
Occitan troubadour warmonger, love of battle, feudal blood-joy
Bernart de Ventadorn · 1160s
Occitan troubadour lark, courtly longing, tender aching fin'amor
Jaufre Rudel · 1140s
troubadour of distant love, amor de lonh, unseen princess overseas
Guiraut de Bornelh · 1180s
troubadour master of alba, dawn parting of lovers, guarded night watch
Beatriz de Dia · 1170s
trobairitz woman voice, betrayed pride, frank courtly desire
Marie de France · 1170s
Anglo-Norman lais, werewolves and nightingales, tender Breton mystery
Chrétien de Troyes · 1170s
Old French Arthurian romance, Lancelot's cart, courtly quest allegory
Wolfram von Eschenbach · 1200s
Middle High German Parzival, grail knight's slow wisdom, gruff mystic wit
Gottfried von Strassburg · 1210s
Middle High German Tristan, love-potion romance, polished courtly rapture
Hartmann von Aue · 1200s
Middle High German romance, Poor Heinrich, chastened knightly humility
Walther von der Vogelweide · 1200s
Middle High German Minnesinger, under the linden tree, springtime lovers
Neidhart von Reuental · 1230s
Middle High German peasant-scene lyric, village dance mockery, rustic burlesque
Tannhäuser (poet) · 1250s
Minnesinger of Venus mountain, exiled pilgrim, sensual repentance
Snorri Sturluson · 1220s
Icelandic saga prose-poet, Edda, cold mythic clarity and skaldic memory
Egill Skallagrímsson · 950s
Icelandic skald, Sonatorrek, granite grief for a drowned son
Bragi Boddason · 800s
earliest named Norse skald, kennings dense as chain mail, mythic shield praise
Eyvindr skáldaspillir · 970s
Norse court skald, Hákonarmál, kings escorted to Valhalla
Þorbjörn Hornklofi · 890s
Norse Haraldskvæði, raven's tale of Harald's battles, hard skaldic praise
Poetic Edda poets (anonymous) · 1200s
Norse mythic lays, Völuspá's cosmic doom, terse alliterative fate
Layamon · 1200s
Middle English Brut, alliterative Arthurian chronicle, rough native music
Orm · 1200s
Middle English Ormulum, obsessive spelling reform, plain devotional homily-verse
Gawain poet (anonymous) · 1370s
alliterative Northwest Middle English, green knight and holly, Christmas courtly test
William Langland · 1370s
Middle English Piers Plowman, dreamed field of folk, moral alliterative rumble
John Gower · 1390s
Middle English Confessio Amantis, seven sins in tidy couplets, moral encyclopedic calm
Geoffrey Chaucer · 1390s
Middle English Canterbury pilgrims, sly humane portraiture, tavern comedy in couplet
Thomas Hoccleve · 1410s
Chaucerian follower, confessional Regement, London clerk's ill-health and prayer
John Lydgate · 1430s
vast Middle English aureate diction, monkish courtly plod, Troy Book scale
William Dunbar · 1500s
Scots makar, Lament for the Makaris, timor mortis conturbat me refrain
Robert Henryson · 1490s
Scots makar, Testament of Cresseid, cold moral fable in fine Scots
Gavin Douglas · 1510s
Scots Eneados, first vernacular Virgil, muscular northern Aeneid
Guillaume de Machaut · 1360s
French poet-composer of ars nova, love-complaint ballades, courtly music-and-verse
Eustache Deschamps · 1390s
French late-medieval ballades, court gossip, prolific moral commentary
Christine de Pizan · 1400s
French woman poet, City of Ladies, elegant defense of women in courtly verse
Charles d'Orléans · 1440s
French royal prisoner, tender rondeaux, spring dressing itself in embroidery
François Villon · 1460s
medieval Parisian outlaw, Ballad of Hanged Men, snows of yesteryear grit
Guillaume de Lorris · 1230s
Roman de la Rose part one, courtly dream allegory, garden of love
Jean de Meun · 1270s
Roman de la Rose part two, encyclopedic satirical continuation, worldly cynicism
Rutebeuf · 1260s
medieval Paris urban complaint, poverty and lost friends, plain moral voice
Adam de la Halle · 1280s
Arras trouvère, pastoral play Robin et Marion, shepherd-lyric with music
Cavalcanti · 1290s
Florentine dolce stil novo, philosophical love-fear, luminous cerebral longing
Guinizelli · 1270s
Bolognese founder of dolce stil novo, gentle heart and noble love, courtly Neoplatonism
Cecco Angiolieri · 1300s
Sienese comic-realist sonneteer, if I were fire I'd burn the world, blasphemous swagger
Cino da Pistoia · 1310s
Tuscan stilnovist, tender legalist's love-sonnet, Dante's friend
Iacopone da Todi · 1290s
Umbrian Franciscan laudi, Stabat Mater, ecstatic self-abasing devotion
Petrarch · 1340s
Tuscan Canzoniere, Laura's laurel, refined introspective sonnet cycle
Boccaccio · 1350s
Florentine narrative verse and prose, plague-frame Decameron, worldly humane wit
Poliziano · 1480s
Florentine humanist, Stanze per la giostra, Botticellian classical grace
Lorenzo de' Medici · 1480s
Medici prince's carnival songs, quant'è bella giovinezza, sweet fugitive youth
Luigi Pulci · 1480s
Florentine Morgante, comic chivalric romance, giant and irreverent bantering knights
Matteo Maria Boiardo · 1490s
Ferrarese Orlando Innamorato, chivalric enchantment, courtly love turned to romance-machine
Ludovico Ariosto · 1520s
Ferrarese Orlando Furioso, sprawling ironic chivalric epic, hippogriff to the moon
Torquato Tasso · 1580s
Ferrarese Gerusalemme Liberata, crusader epic, melancholic pious grandeur
Michelangelo Buonarroti · 1540s
sculptor's spiritual sonnets, chisel and God, aging Neoplatonic longing
Vittoria Colonna · 1540s
Roman noblewoman's devotional sonnets, widow's Christ-love, austere spiritual friendship
Gaspara Stampa · 1550s
Venetian woman lyric, betrayed Petrarchan passion, torch that burns brighter for being spurned
Veronica Franco · 1570s
Venetian courtesan poet, defiant erotic sonnets, wit sharpened against misogyny
Isabella di Morra · 1540s
isolated Basilicata noblewoman, tower-window melancholy, murdered young for her verses
Giambattista Marino · 1620s
Neapolitan baroque Adone, dazzling conceits, sensuous ornamental overload
Ausiàs March · 1440s
Valencian Catalan lyric, austere love-and-death introspection, pre-Petrarchan Iberian voice
Jordi de Sant Jordi · 1420s
Catalan courtly troubadour, prisoner's ballad, refined chivalric love
Jorge Manrique · 1470s
Castilian Coplas por la muerte de su padre, our lives are rivers to the sea, grave stately elegy
Marqués de Santillana · 1440s
Castilian courtier, serranillas of mountain girls, elegant proto-Renaissance
Juan de Mena · 1440s
Castilian Laberinto de Fortuna, Latinate allegorical epic, moralized wheel of fate
Fernando de Rojas · 1490s
Castilian Celestina dialogue, urban tragicomedy, sly bawdy old go-between
Garcilaso de la Vega · 1530s
Spanish soldier-poet, Italianate eclogues, tender pastoral melancholy
Fray Luis de León · 1570s
Salamanca Augustinian, retired-life ode, night-sky ascent to God
St John of the Cross · 1580s
Spanish Carmelite mystic, dark night of the soul, erotic bridal union with God
St Teresa of Ávila · 1570s
Spanish mystic prose-poet, interior castle, plain ecstatic reforming voice
Luis de Góngora · 1610s
Spanish culteranismo, Soledades, baroque Latinate density and dazzling image
Francisco de Quevedo · 1620s
Spanish conceptista satire, sonnets on death and money, biting bilious wit
Lope de Vega · 1610s
prolific Spanish Golden Age dramatist-sonneteer, effortless amorous flow
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz · 1680s
Mexican nun, Primero Sueño, learned baroque dream-vision defending women's mind
Luís de Camões · 1570s
Portuguese Lusíadas, Vasco da Gama sea-epic, exile's oceanic patriotic grandeur
Bernardim Ribeiro · 1550s
Portuguese eclogue-melancholy, Menina e Moça, sad-girl pastoral
Gil Vicente · 1520s
Portuguese court dramatist, autos and farces, plainsong Iberian folk theatre
Pierre de Ronsard · 1560s
French Pléiade sonnets, mignonne allons voir si la rose, Renaissance carpe diem
Joachim du Bellay · 1550s
French Pléiade Antiquités de Rome, homesick ruins-sonnets, defense of French tongue
Louise Labé · 1550s
Lyonnais woman sonneteer, burning and drowning, frank Renaissance female desire
Maurice Scève · 1540s
Lyonnais dizains, Délie, hermetic Neoplatonic love-cipher
Clément Marot · 1530s
early French Renaissance courtly wit, epigrams and psalm translation, easy grace
Agrippa d'Aubigné · 1610s
Huguenot warrior-poet, Les Tragiques, apocalyptic religious-war fury
François de Malherbe · 1610s
French classicist reformer, austere odes, clear disciplined restraint after baroque
Jean de La Fontaine · 1670s
French Fables, sly beast-morals, deceptively easy conversational verse
Nicolas Boileau · 1670s
French Art poétique, neoclassical rules in couplet, waspish rational satire
Jean Racine · 1670s
French classical tragedian, Phèdre's incestuous burn, pure alexandrine grief
Pierre Corneille · 1640s
French classical tragedian, Le Cid, honor and duty in stately alexandrines
Molière · 1660s
French verse comedy, Tartuffe and Misanthrope, sharp social hypocrisy skewered
Théophile de Viau · 1620s
libertine French baroque, sensuous nature, prosecuted for impiety
Saint-Amant · 1640s
French baroque burlesque, drunken hermit Solitude, luxuriant grotesque description
Andrew Marvell · 1650s
English metaphysical, coy mistress and green shade, cool witty pastoral politics
George Herbert · 1630s
English devotional metaphysical, Temple pattern-poems, tender wrestling with Love
Henry Vaughan · 1650s
Welsh metaphysical mystic, retreat and world of light, silent starry longing
Thomas Traherne · 1670s
English metaphysical rapture, orient wheat in Eden, childhood cosmic wonder
Richard Crashaw · 1640s
English Catholic baroque devotional, tears and wounds, ecstatic sensuous saint-praise
Robert Herrick · 1640s
English cavalier lyric, gather ye rosebuds, Devon country charms and Julia's silks
Ben Jonson · 1610s
English classical dramatist-poet, drink to me only, chiseled Roman-modeled epigram
Sir Philip Sidney · 1580s
Elizabethan sonnet cycle Astrophil and Stella, courtly wit and defense of poesy
Edmund Spenser · 1590s
Elizabethan Faerie Queene, archaic allegorical romance, moral chivalric shimmer
Sir Thomas Wyatt · 1540s
early Tudor sonneteer, they flee from me, wary courtier love
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey · 1540s
early English blank verse pioneer, elegies and Aeneid, courtly refined form
Christopher Marlowe · 1590s
Elizabethan mighty line, Faustus and Tamburlaine, blasphemous overreaching grandeur
George Chapman · 1610s
Jacobean Homer translator, dense muscular blank verse, learned obscurity
Michael Drayton · 1610s
Jacobean Poly-Olbion, chorographic English landscape epic, patriotic river-song
Samuel Daniel · 1600s
Elizabethan Delia sonnets, civil-war history verse, sober meditative sweetness
Fulke Greville · 1610s
Jacobean philosophical Caelica, stoic dark aphoristic sonnets
Mary Sidney Herbert · 1600s
Countess of Pembroke, Psalm paraphrases, learned Protestant patroness voice
Mary Wroth · 1620s
Jacobean woman sonneteer, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, labyrinth of constant love
Aemilia Lanyer · 1610s
Jacobean Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, proto-feminist Christ-passion
Anne Bradstreet · 1660s
colonial New England, tender letters to her husband, Puritan domestic elegy
Edward Taylor · 1690s
colonial New England Puritan, Preparatory Meditations, hidden metaphysical devotion
Phillis Wheatley · 1770s
enslaved Boston prodigy, neoclassical elegy, moral evangelical dignity
Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea · 1710s
early eighteenth-century English, Nocturnal Reverie, quiet nature and melancholy
Alexander Pope · 1730s
English neoclassical heroic couplet, Essay on Man, glittering satirical wit
Jonathan Swift · 1720s
Anglo-Irish satirist in verse, savage indignation, plain misanthropic bite
John Dryden · 1680s
Restoration heroic couplet, Absalom and Achitophel, magisterial political satire
Thomas Gray · 1750s
English Elegy in a Country Churchyard, twilight rural stanzas, dignified pathos
William Cowper · 1780s
English quiet evangelical, Task and hymnody, melancholy garden meditation
James Thomson · 1730s
Scottish The Seasons, blank verse landscape, Enlightenment nature description
Edward Young · 1740s
English Night Thoughts, graveyard-school gloom, midnight moral rhapsody
Christopher Smart · 1760s
English devotional oddity, Jubilate Agno, cat Jeoffry and litany-praise from Bedlam
Oliver Goldsmith · 1770s
Anglo-Irish Deserted Village, sweet Auburn nostalgia, humane rural elegy
George Crabbe · 1810s
English realist rural verse, The Borough, grim honest East Anglian tales
Charlotte Smith · 1790s
English Elegiac Sonnets, coastal melancholy, exile and sea-cliff lament
Anna Laetitia Barbauld · 1800s
English dissenting Enlightenment, hymn and political ode, warm rational voice
Felicia Hemans · 1830s
English Casabianca and Homes of England, sentimental patriotic and domestic pathos
Letitia Elizabeth Landon · 1830s
English Improvisatrice, romantic feminine melancholy, tragic annual-plate glamour
Thomas Chatterton · 1770s
boy-forger Rowley poems, faux-medieval Bristol pastiche, doomed teen prodigy
James Macpherson (Ossian) · 1760s
purported ancient Gaelic bard, misty Highland lament, huge influence on Romanticism
Robert Southey · 1810s
Lake School laureate, Thalaba and moralizing Britannic verse, sober Romantic worthy
Samuel Taylor Coleridge · 1800s
English Romantic, Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, opium-lit dream-metaphysics
Leigh Hunt · 1820s
London Cockney-school warmth, Rimini and Jenny kiss'd me, genial familiar verse
Thomas Hood · 1840s
English comic-serious, Song of the Shirt, punning wit and social pity
Walter Savage Landor · 1830s
English classicist, Imaginary Conversations and chiseled epigram, warm the hands at life's fire
Arthur Hugh Clough · 1850s
Victorian doubt, Amours de Voyage, ironic hexameter agnostic sojourner
Matthew Arnold · 1860s
Victorian Dover Beach, sea of faith withdrawing, melancholy cultured meditation
Alfred Lord Tennyson · 1860s
Victorian In Memoriam, Arthurian idylls, sonorous mournful public music
Robert Browning · 1860s
Victorian dramatic monologue, my last duchess, sinewy character-voice
Algernon Charles Swinburne · 1870s
Victorian pagan sensualist, hymn to Proserpine, torrential alliterative rebellion
Coventry Patmore · 1860s
Victorian domestic idyll, Angel in the House, tender-mystical marriage
George Meredith · 1860s
Victorian Modern Love sonnets, sixteen-line ache, cerebral marital breakdown
Ernest Dowson · 1890s
English Decadent, Cynara refrain, absinthe-and-lilies fin de siècle ache
Lionel Johnson · 1890s
English Decadent Catholic, statue of Charles I, austere melancholic classicism
Arthur Symons · 1890s
English Symbolist, London music-hall and Paris cafes, impressionist twilight
A. E. Housman · 1890s
Shropshire Lad, Latinist's plain stoic pastoral grief, doomed young athlete
Thomas Hardy · 1910s
Wessex sombre lyric, ghosts of Emma and the darkling thrush, honest ironic sorrow
Rudyard Kipling · 1900s
imperial ballad, if and Recessional, muscular music of soldiers and machines
Robert Bridges · 1910s
English laureate, Testament of Beauty, careful classical sprung meter
Charlotte Mew · 1910s
English quiet outsider lyric, farmer's bride, restrained agonized dramatic voice
Edward Thomas · 1910s
English rural quiet, Adlestrop platform, unremarked path into war
Wilfred Owen · 1910s
trench war elegy, dulce et decorum lie, pity distilled through gas and mud
Siegfried Sassoon · 1910s
trench satire, bitter general and blighty, terse angry witness
Isaac Rosenberg · 1910s
trench modernist, break of day in trenches, rat and poppy at dawn
Rupert Brooke · 1910s
Georgian golden-boy soldier, if I should die, sunlit patriotic elegy
Ivor Gurney · 1920s
Gloucestershire soldier-composer, war-broken pastoral, moon-mad quiet
Edward Fitzgerald · 1860s
Victorian translator of Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám, wine and moving finger, exquisite fatalism
Dante Gabriel Rossetti · 1870s
Pre-Raphaelite House of Life sonnets, jewel-crammed sensual medievalism
William Morris · 1870s
Pre-Raphaelite Earthly Paradise, tapestry-medieval narrative, socialist craftsman-poet
Elizabeth Siddal · 1860s
Pre-Raphaelite muse-poet, brief hushed lyrics of shadow and rest
Alfred Austin · 1900s
Victorian laureate remembered as bad, garden of England panegyric, well-meaning platitude
Adelaide Anne Procter · 1860s
Victorian devotional-sentimental, Lost Chord, singable Christian sympathy
Michael Field · 1890s
aunt-and-niece pseudonym, aesthetic Sapphic classicism, ekphrastic art-love
Amy Levy · 1880s
Anglo-Jewish urban lyric, London plane-tree, wry queer proto-modern melancholy
Mathilde Blind · 1880s
cosmopolitan Victorian, evolutionary Ascent of Man, ardent freethinking sweep
Alice Meynell · 1900s
quiet English Catholic essayist-poet, restrained interior devotion, prose-lit lyric
Ambrose Bierce · 1900s
American caustic epigram and Devil's Dictionary, dry mordant frontier misanthropy
Sidney Lanier · 1880s
American Southern musical prosody, marshes of Glynn, flute-cadence pastoral
Paul Laurence Dunbar · 1900s
African-American dialect and standard lyric, we wear the mask, dignified double voice
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper · 1870s
African-American abolitionist lyric, Aunt Chloe, plain moral ballad
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · 1860s
American Hiawatha and Paul Revere, singable schoolroom narrative, gentle hexameter
John Greenleaf Whittier · 1860s
American Quaker Snow-Bound, abolitionist hymn-tune, homely New England warmth
James Russell Lowell · 1860s
American Fireside poet, Biglow satire, Yankee dialect civic wit
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. · 1860s
American Fireside, Chambered Nautilus, gentlemanly conversational moralism
William Cullen Bryant · 1830s
American Thanatopsis, forest primeval, dignified early republic elegy
Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1850s
American Transcendentalist, Concord hymn, gnomic self-reliant essay-verse
Henry David Thoreau · 1850s
American Walden pond, terse anti-slavery epigram, sinewy prose-poet naturalist
Herman Melville · 1870s
American Battle-Pieces and Clarel, craggy metaphysical Civil War hexameter
Stephen Crane · 1890s
American proto-modernist parable, in the desert, terse allegorical grimace
Edwin Arlington Robinson · 1910s
American Tilbury Town portraits, Richard Cory shot himself, dry ironic pity
Edgar Lee Masters · 1910s
American Spoon River Anthology, cemetery voices confessing, plainspoken epitaph
Vachel Lindsay · 1910s
American Congo and General Booth, chanted vaudeville-hymn rhythm
Sara Teasdale · 1910s
American quiet lyric, there will come soft rains, pure crystalline resignation
Amy Lowell · 1910s
American Imagist Patterns, brocaded gown pacing gravel, sensuous precise picture
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) · 1920s
American Imagist, sea rose and Trilogy, austere mythic-precise crystalline line
Marianne Moore · 1930s
American observational precision, imaginary gardens with real toads, syllabic wit
William Carlos Williams · 1930s
American Paterson doctor, red wheelbarrow, plain American speech
Ezra Pound · 1920s
American Cantos, ideogrammic international modernism, cracked Confucian troubadour
Robinson Jeffers · 1940s
California Big Sur granite, hawks and cliffs, misanthropic cosmic inhumanism
Hart Crane · 1930s
American ecstatic Bridge, Brooklyn cables into myth, dense visionary rapture
Countee Cullen · 1920s
Harlem Renaissance sonneteer, Yet Do I Marvel, classical form on Black subject
Claude McKay · 1920s
Jamaican-Harlem Renaissance, If We Must Die, defiant Shakespearean-form protest
Jean Toomer · 1920s
Harlem Renaissance Cane, Georgia dusk lyric-prose, cane-field twilight fusion
Anne Spencer · 1930s
Harlem Renaissance garden-poet, Lynchburg intimate lyric, quiet exquisite indignation
Sterling Brown · 1930s
Harlem Renaissance folk-blues verse, Ma Rainey and Slim Greer, vernacular dignity
Jean Cocteau · 1930s
French avant-garde polymath, jazz-age Orpheus, lightly luminous mythic verse
Guillaume Apollinaire · 1910s
French Alcools and Calligrammes, unpunctuated modern flow, love and war and shapes
Arthur Rimbaud · 1870s
French teen visionary, drunken boat, hallucinatory prose-poem lightning
Paul Verlaine · 1880s
French Symbolist, sanglots longs des violons, autumn-blurred musical melancholy
Stéphane Mallarmé · 1890s
French hermetic Symbolist, throw of the dice, blank-white-space metaphysical suggestion
Charles Baudelaire · 1860s
French Fleurs du Mal, spleen and ideal, urban decadent modernity's inventor
Théophile Gautier · 1850s
French art-for-art's-sake Émaux et Camées, chiseled sculptural ornament
Leconte de Lisle · 1870s
French Parnassian, glacial mythic Poèmes barbares, impassive marble grandeur
José-Maria de Heredia · 1890s
French Parnassian sonnets, Les Trophées, jeweled historical tableau
Sully Prudhomme · 1890s
French first Nobel laureate, gentle philosophical intimism, broken vase
Comte de Lautréamont · 1870s
French proto-Surreal Maldoror, chance meeting of umbrella and sewing machine, black cosmic blasphemy
Jules Laforgue · 1880s
French Symbolist ironist, Pierrot moon, urbane free-verse ennui, huge influence on Eliot
Tristan Corbière · 1870s
Breton outsider, Amours jaunes, jagged ironic sailor-slang lyric
Charles Cros · 1880s
French bohemian inventor-poet, kippered herring monologue, wry Montmartre eccentric
Anna de Noailles · 1910s
French Belle Époque sensualist, dazzled cosmic pantheistic joy
Marceline Desbordes-Valmore · 1830s
French Romantic woman lyric, roses of Saadi, tender heart-song simplicity
Alphonse de Lamartine · 1830s
French Romantic Le Lac, love and time and mournful shoreline meditation
Alfred de Musset · 1840s
French Romantic, Nights, dandy heartbroken confessional dialogue with Muse
Alfred de Vigny · 1840s
French Romantic stoic, wolf's silent death, philosophical pessimism
Victor Hugo · 1860s
French Romantic titan, Contemplations and Légende des siècles, thunderous grandeur
Gérard de Nerval · 1850s
French Romantic dreamer, El Desdichado, tarot-lit hermetic sonnets and madness
Aloysius Bertrand · 1840s
French inventor of prose poem, Gaspard de la Nuit, gothic miniature painting
Novalis · 1800s
German early Romantic, Hymns to the Night, mystical Sophia longing
Friedrich Hölderlin · 1800s
German Romantic, Bread and Wine, Greek-haunted odes descending into madness
Heinrich Heine · 1850s
German Romantic ironist, Lorelei and Buch der Lieder, sweet song with bitter aftertaste
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1800s
German Weimar giant, Faust and Roman Elegies, protean classical-romantic wisdom
Friedrich Schiller · 1800s
German Sturm und Drang, Ode to Joy, moral idealist thunder
Eduard Mörike · 1850s
German quiet Biedermeier lyric, gentle Swabian dawn, tender formal delicacy
Annette von Droste-Hülshoff · 1840s
German Westphalian nature-lyric, heath and moor, austere Catholic vision
Nikolaus Lenau · 1840s
Austrian Romantic melancholic, autumn and reeds, Weltschmerz gloom
Stefan George · 1900s
German austere symbolist, Der Siebente Ring, hieratic cult-master aesthetic
Georg Trakl · 1910s
Austrian Expressionist, decline of colors, blue evenings and sister and rot
Georg Heym · 1910s
German Expressionist Umbra Vitae, apocalyptic city, cold prophetic panorama
Else Lasker-Schüler · 1910s
German Jewish Expressionist, oriental blue piano, incandescent tender oddity
Hugo von Hofmannsthal · 1900s
Viennese fin de siècle, Chandos letter, aesthete's crisis of language
Christian Morgenstern · 1910s
German Galgenlieder gallows songs, playful nonsense-metaphysical
August Stramm · 1910s
German Expressionist shattered telegraphic war lyric, single-word blows
Gottfried Benn · 1920s
German Expressionist morgue poet, cold cadaver aesthete, severely reduced form
Adam Mickiewicz · 1830s
Polish Romantic bard, Pan Tadeusz, exiled national epic in twelve books
Juliusz Słowacki · 1840s
Polish Romantic mystic, Kordian and Beniowski, ornate messianic wanderer
Cyprian Kamil Norwid · 1870s
Polish late Romantic, Vade-mecum, terse ironic exile misunderstood in his time
Sándor Petőfi · 1840s
Hungarian Romantic revolutionary, National Song, rise up Magyar with fiery folk voice
Mihai Eminescu · 1880s
Romanian Romantic, Luceafărul, cosmic evening-star melancholy
Mikhail Lermontov · 1840s
Russian Romantic, Demon and lonely sail, brooding Caucasian exile
Fyodor Tyutchev · 1860s
Russian metaphysical lyric, Silentium, cosmic-nature hush and inner chaos
Afanasy Fet · 1880s
Russian pure-lyric impressionist, whispered dew garden, wordless music
Nikolay Nekrasov · 1870s
Russian civic peasant-sympathy, Who Lives Well in Russia, plain hard folk-cadence
Alexander Blok · 1910s
Russian Symbolist, Twelve, revolutionary snowstorm with Christ ahead
Andrei Bely · 1910s
Russian Symbolist, Petersburg, mystical-mathematical urban vision
Vladimir Mayakovsky · 1920s
Russian Futurist megaphone, cloud in trousers, jagged stairstep revolutionary shout
Velimir Khlebnikov · 1920s
Russian Futurist zaum, neologism-shaman, cosmic word-magic experiments
Osip Mandelstam · 1930s
Russian Acmeist, Stalin epigram, honeyed classical Petersburg exile
Marina Tsvetaeva · 1930s
Russian ecstatic dash-riddled emigrant, poem of the end, headlong exile passion
Boris Pasternak · 1950s
Russian Doctor Zhivago poems, snowy candle in the window, tender historical lyric
Nikolay Gumilev · 1910s
Russian Acmeist adventurer, giraffe by Lake Chad, exotic virile clean line
Sergei Yesenin · 1920s
Russian peasant lyric, birch trees and drunken tavern, rural nostalgic doom
Kālidāsa · 400s
Sanskrit court poet, Meghadūta, cloud-messenger lover in Himalayan monsoon
Bhartṛhari · 400s
Sanskrit Śatakatraya, three centuries on love renunciation and worldly wisdom
Bhavabhūti · 700s
Sanskrit Uttararamacarita, tender dramatic tragic Rama, refined pathos
Amaru · 700s
Sanskrit Amaruśataka, hundred erotic miniatures, gesture in a single stanza
Jayadeva · 1100s
Sanskrit Gita Govinda, Krishna and Radha, sensuous devotional song-cycle
Vidyāpati · 1400s
Maithili Radha-Krishna lyric, courtly-vernacular devotional erotic
Mīrābāī · 1500s
Rajasthani bhakti woman-saint, Krishna's bride, ecstatic public devotion
Kabīr · 1500s
North Indian weaver-saint, blunt bhakti dohas against ritual, plain mystical thunder
Tulsīdās · 1600s
Awadhi Rāmcharitmānas, devotional Rama-epic in warm vernacular chaupai
Sūrdās · 1500s
blind bhakti singer of Krishna's childhood, tender playful Braj lyric
Ghalib · 1850s
Urdu-Persian Delhi ghazal, sardonic melancholy, elliptical philosophical wit
Mīr Taqī Mīr · 1780s
Urdu ghazal master, delicate ruined-heart lamentation, plain deep sorrow
Sauda · 1780s
Urdu satirist and marsiya, biting comic verse and Karbala elegy
Iqbal · 1930s
Urdu-Persian philosopher-poet, self-realization khudi, pan-Islamic modernist grandeur
Amir Khusrau · 1300s
Persian-Hindavi Delhi Sufi, ghazal and qawwali, playful mystical bilingual charm
Firdawsī · 1000s
Persian Shāhnāmeh, epic of Iranian kings, stately mythic hexameter
Sa'dī of Shiraz · 1250s
Persian Gulistan Bustan, worldly-wise aphoristic prose-verse gardens
Attar of Nishapur · 1200s
Persian Sufi Conference of the Birds, allegorical soul-flight to the Simurgh
Nizami Ganjavi · 1180s
Persian Khamsa, Layla and Majnun and Khosrow and Shirin, jeweled romantic epic
Omar Khayyám · 1100s
Persian mathematician-quatrainist, wine and jug, skeptical carpe diem
Jāmī · 1490s
last classical Persian master, Yusuf and Zulaikha, refined Sufi allegorical love
Rūdakī · 930s
father of Persian poetry, praise and wine and mother of wine, blind bard
Hâfez · 1380s
Persian Shirazi ghazal, tavern of the divine, playful drunk mystical devotion
Bidel Dihlavi · 1720s
Indo-Persian sabk-i hindi baroque, dense metaphysical mirror-conceit, mystical density
Yunus Emre · 1300s
Anatolian Turkish Sufi, plain love of God in folk quatrain, mystic vernacular tenderness
Fuzuli · 1550s
Ottoman-Azeri Layla and Majnun, refined melancholic love-mystic
Nef'i · 1620s
Ottoman panegyrist and savage satirist, executed for his epigrams
Nedim · 1720s
Ottoman Tulip Era, playful hedonist Istanbul lyric, Sadabad garden charm
Şeyh Galib · 1790s
Ottoman late Mevlevi, Hüsn ü Aşk beauty and love, ornate Sufi allegory
Nasimi · 1400s
Hurufi Turkic-Persian mystic, flayed alive for pantheistic ecstasy
Al-Mutanabbi · 960s
Arab classical master, panegyric and swagger, terse blade-bright hemistich
Abu Nuwas · 800s
Abbasid Baghdad, khamriyyat wine songs, cheerfully transgressive libertine urbanity
Al-Ma'arri · 1050s
blind Syrian skeptic, Risalat al-Ghufran, pessimistic vegetarian metaphysical wit
Imru' al-Qais · 500s
pre-Islamic mu'allaqa, wandering prince's ode, tent-camp lament and horse and love
Antara ibn Shaddad · 500s
pre-Islamic warrior-poet, mu'allaqa of black knight-slave, Abla's love and battle glory
Labid · 600s
pre-Islamic mu'allaqa, abandoned campsite, terse desert nostalgia
Al-Khansa · 600s
pre-Islamic woman elegist, brother Sakhr mourned, unmatched Arabic ritha grief
Ibn al-Rumi · 890s
Abbasid, longing for Baghdad neighborhood, superstitious detailed satire and elegy
Ibn al-Farid · 1230s
Arab Sufi wine-of-love qasida, ecstatic union in classical form
Ibn Zaydun · 1060s
Andalusian courtly Cordoba, exile letters to Wallada, refined nostalgic love
Wallada bint al-Mustakfi · 1080s
Andalusian princess-poet, defiant erotic epigram, embroidered independence
Ibn Hazm · 1030s
Andalusian polymath, Ring of the Dove, anatomy of love in verse and prose
Al-Mu'tamid ibn Abbad · 1080s
Andalusian Seville king, exile in Aghmat, royal ruin-elegy
Yehuda Halevi · 1140s
Andalusian Hebrew poet, Zion odes, pilgrim's Jerusalem longing
Shmuel HaNagid · 1050s
Andalusian Hebrew vizier-general, wartime and wine-party poems, Iberian Golden Age
Ibn Gabirol · 1050s
Andalusian Hebrew Neoplatonic, Keter Malkhut Kingly Crown, philosophical devotional grandeur
Moses ibn Ezra · 1130s
Andalusian Hebrew, exile from Granada, refined penitential Selihot
Yosa Buson · 1770s
haiku painter-poet, warmer pictorial spring evenings, colored image-clarity
Kobayashi Issa · 1810s
haiku plebeian humanist, snail slowly slowly climb Fuji, tender sympathy for small creatures
Masaoka Shiki · 1890s
modern haiku reformer, dying persimmons, sketch-from-life realism
Ono no Komachi · 800s
Heian woman waka, fading cherry beauty, aching evanescent lyric
Ariwara no Narihira · 800s
Heian court playboy waka, Ise Monogatari, elegant exile lovelorn
Ki no Tsurayuki · 900s
Heian Kokinshu compiler, refined courtly seasonal waka, canonical preface
Izumi Shikibu · 1000s
Heian passionate court woman waka, restless love and Buddhist longing
Murasaki Shikibu · 1000s
author of Genji, embedded court waka of hidden longing and courtly veils
Sei Shōnagon · 1000s
Heian Pillow Book lists, sharp aesthetic gaze, snow and lovers and elegant embarrassments
Saigyō · 1180s
wandering monk-waka, cherry moon and wandering longing, Buddhist aesthetic solitude
Fujiwara no Teika · 1200s
Shinkokinshu compiler, yugen mystery, austere refined perfumed lyricism
Ryokan · 1830s
Zen hermit calligrapher, tender playful moon-and-children, empty-bowl simplicity
Ikkyū · 1470s
iconoclast Zen monk, Crazy Cloud Anthology, brothel-and-satori bawdy enlightenment
Chiyo-ni · 1770s
Edo woman haiku, morning glory on well-bucket, quiet Buddhist domestic
Hakuin Ekaku · 1750s
Rinzai Zen master's verse-and-song, one-hand koan, forceful vernacular Buddhist
Kamo no Chōmei · 1210s
Hōjōki hermit prose-poet, floating world, dwelling smaller than a hut
Kakinomoto no Hitomaro · 700s
Man'yōshū court elegist, princely laments in long chōka, sonorous archaic Japanese
Ōtomo no Yakamochi · 760s
Man'yōshū compiler and lyricist, cuckoo and plum, refined court seasonal
Sugawara no Michizane · 900s
Heian scholar-official, exile to Kyushu, plum tree following him, Sinophone Japanese verse
Du Fu · 760s
Tang Chinese sage poet, war and famine, dense compassionate historical lyric
Wang Wei · 760s
Tang painter-poet, Wangchuan estate, empty mountain moonlight Chan quietude
Bai Juyi · 830s
Tang plainspoken humanist, Everlasting Regret, common-people vernacular reach
Li Shangyin · 850s
late Tang, hermetic Untitled poems, jeweled ambiguous erotic-mystic
Du Mu · 850s
late Tang, Red Cliff and courtesan quarters, elegant regret and historical melancholy
Meng Haoran · 740s
Tang recluse, spring dawn birds, quiet pastoral hermit
Han Yu · 820s
Tang Confucian reformer, strong-boned prose-influenced verse, moral austerity
Liu Zongyuan · 810s
Tang exile in the south, lone snow-fisherman, spare cold ink brushstroke
Cao Zhi · 230s
Three Kingdoms prince-poet, walk-seven-steps ballad, tragic refined pentasyllabic
Tao Yuanming · 410s
recluse chrysanthemum drinker, return to fields, plainspoken retirement classic
Xie Lingyun · 430s
Six Dynasties landscape founder, mountain-and-water lyric, aristocratic sublime
Ruan Ji · 260s
Seven Sages of Bamboo Grove, Songs of My Cares, veiled political grief
Ji Kang · 260s
Seven Sages qin-player, elegant refusal to serve, executed with music-book in hand
Yu Xin · 570s
Six Dynasties exile southerner in the north, Lament for the South, ornate fu grief
Su Shi · 1080s
Song polymath exile, Red Cliff rhapsodies, warm philosophical breadth
Li Qingzhao · 1130s
Song woman ci-lyricist, refined widow's grief, delicate remembered spring
Xin Qiji · 1180s
Southern Song patriot-general ci, defeated warrior's swaggering exile lyric
Lu You · 1200s
Southern Song prolific patriot, dying-wish to see reunified north, rustic tenderness
Ouyang Xiu · 1060s
Northern Song statesman-poet, Drunken Old Man Pavilion, mellow prose-and-verse
Huang Tingjian · 1090s
Northern Song Jiangxi school founder, dense allusive controlled lines
Mei Yaochen · 1050s
Northern Song plainness-master, unadorned everyday hardship
Zhu Xi · 1180s
Song Neo-Confucian philosopher-poet, half-acre pond mirror, moral quatrain clarity
Yuan Zhen · 820s
Tang, Bai Juyi's friend, Yingying romance and grief for his wife, tender realist
Wei Zhuang · 900s
late Tang / Five Dynasties ci pioneer, southern rivers, refined melancholy song-lyric
Li Yu (Li Houzhu) · 970s
last ruler of Southern Tang, captive ci of lost kingdom, endless sorrow like east-flowing river
Wang Anshi · 1080s
Northern Song reformer, terse observant political and landscape verse
Qu Yuan · 300s BCE
Chu Ci Lisao, exiled minister drowning, shamanic soaring self-lament
Song Yu · 200s BCE
Chu Ci follower, refined fu on wind and gaotang, sensuous rhetorical display
Shijing poets (anonymous) · 700s BCE
Book of Songs, folk airs and hymns, agricultural courtship in tetrasyllabic parallel
Mahādēviyakka · 1100s
Kannada Virashaiva vachana, naked walking devotee of Shiva Chennamallikarjuna
Basavanna · 1100s
Kannada Virashaiva reformer, vachana against caste and temple, plain devotional prose-verse
Allama Prabhu · 1100s
Kannada Virashaiva enigmatic vachana, koan-like devotional paradox
Nammalvar · 800s
Tamil Alvar Vaishnava, Tiruvaymoli, ecstatic devotion to Vishnu in bridal voice
Andal · 800s
Tamil Alvar woman-saint, Tiruppavai, teenage bride of Krishna, sensuous devotional
Appar · 600s
Tamil Shaiva Nayanar, devotional Thevaram, humble slave-of-Shiva refrain
Manikkavacakar · 800s
Tamil Shaiva Thiruvasagam, ecstatic self-melting devotion
Tiruvalluvar · 500s
Tamil Tirukkural, 1330 aphoristic couplets on virtue wealth and love
Nakkirar · 600s
Tamil Sangam, Tirumurukatruppatai, devotional guidance to Murugan mountain shrine
Kapilar · 200s
Tamil Sangam bardic, akam interior love and puram public heroism
Auvaiyar · 1200s
Tamil woman-poet across centuries, gnomic ethical Athichudi for children
Kambar · 1200s
Tamil Ramavataram, devotional Rama-epic in ornate viruttam
Ilango Adigal · 500s
Tamil Silappatikaram, Kannagi's anklet, tragic Chola-Pandya epic
Namdev · 1300s
Marathi Varkari bhakti, Vitthal of Pandharpur, simple ecstatic abhang
Tukaram · 1650s
Marathi Varkari householder-saint, blunt God-drunk abhang, low-caste devotional wit
Dnyaneshwar · 1290s
Marathi teenage saint, Dnyaneshwari Gita-commentary in verse, sweet philosophical devotion
Chandidas · 1400s
Bengali Vaishnava, Radha's love pangs, plain melodic padavali
Ramprasad Sen · 1770s
Bengali Shakta, Ma Kali songs, sardonic loving complaint to the Mother
Michael Madhusudan Dutt · 1860s
Bengali Meghnad-badh, blank-verse Ravana-side epic, muscular colonial modern
Rabindranath Tagore · 1910s
Bengali Gitanjali, gentle universalist devotion, Nobel lyric warmth
Nazrul Islam · 1930s
Bengali rebel-poet, Bidrohi thunder, syncretic Hindu-Muslim revolutionary voice
Subramania Bharati · 1920s
Tamil revolutionary modernist, Shakti and freedom, incandescent nationalist lyric
Nezahualcoyotl · 1470s
Nahua philosopher-king of Texcoco, flower-and-song, jade-and-quetzal transience
Popol Vuh compilers (anonymous) · 1550s
K'iche' Maya cosmogony, hero twins in Xibalba, oral-alphabetic epic transcription
Andrés Bello · 1830s
Venezuelan-Chilean neoclassical, Silva a la agricultura, republican Latin American georgic
José Hernández · 1870s
Argentine gaucho epic Martín Fierro, pampas plainspoken outcast
Rubén Darío · 1900s
Nicaraguan modernismo, swans and princesses, jeweled musical renewal of Spanish verse
José Martí · 1890s
Cuban revolutionary, Versos sencillos, plain-cut sincerity and moral heat
José Asunción Silva · 1890s
Colombian early modernismo, Nocturno of dead sister, elongated melancholic music
Amado Nervo · 1900s
Mexican modernist, gentle mystical Plenitud, serene inward faith
Salvador Díaz Mirón · 1900s
Mexican modernist, sculpted violent classical form, prison-hardened voice
Delmira Agustini · 1910s
Uruguayan modernista woman, frank erotic swan mythology, murdered young
Alfonsina Storni · 1930s
Argentine woman poet, defiant modern love, walked into the sea
Gabriela Mistral · 1940s
Chilean schoolteacher Nobel, mothers and children and Andean soil, tender austere elemental
César Vallejo · 1930s
Peruvian anguished modernist, Trilce and Human Poems, cracked syntax of Andean sorrow
Vicente Huidobro · 1930s
Chilean Creationist Altazor, parachutist's linguistic free-fall, avant-garde cosmic
Anonymous Song of Songs poet · 500s BCE
Hebrew Bible erotic pastoral, vineyards and myrrh, allegorized ecstatic love
Anonymous Psalms poets · 600s BCE
Hebrew Bible parallelism, refuge and lament, communal-personal devotional
Anonymous Book of Job poet · 500s BCE
Hebrew Bible wisdom drama, whirlwind theophany, Leviathan and Behemoth defiance
Anonymous prophet Isaiah · 700s BCE
Hebrew Bible prophetic oracle, wolf lying with lamb, sonorous denunciation and comfort
Anonymous Lamentations poet · 500s BCE
Hebrew Bible acrostic city-lament for Jerusalem, ashes and widow
Ephrem the Syrian · 370s
Syriac hymnist, madrashe against heresies, richly imagistic Christian devotional
Romanos the Melodist · 550s
Byzantine Greek kontakion, Nativity and Passion hymns, dramatic liturgical drama-song
John of Damascus · 740s
Byzantine hymnographer, Paschal canon, exuberant Easter theological song
Andrew of Crete · 740s
Byzantine Great Kanon, penitential nine-ode meditation, sustained soul-searching
Cassia (Kassiane) · 860s
Byzantine woman hymnographer, hymn of the sinful woman, austere Lenten beauty
Symeon the New Theologian · 1020s
Byzantine mystical hymns of divine love, uncreated light, ecstatic monastic union
George of Pisidia · 630s
Byzantine hexameter, Heraclius's Persian campaign, panegyric war-verse
Marguerite Porete · 1310s
French beguine, Mirror of Simple Souls, burned for annihilated-soul mystical dialogue
Julian of Norwich · 1390s
English anchoress, Revelations of Divine Love, hazelnut of all-that-is, tender maternal Christ
Mechthild of Magdeburg · 1280s
German Beguine, Flowing Light of the Godhead, bridal ecstatic Middle Low German
Hadewijch of Antwerp · 1240s
Brabantine Beguine, courtly-mystic love songs, minne as ravishing wound
Angelus Silesius · 1670s
German mystic epigram, Cherubinic Wanderer, Zen-like couplet of soul and God
Paul Gerhardt · 1670s
German Lutheran hymnist, O Sacred Head Now Wounded, warm devotional chorale
Andreas Gryphius · 1650s
German Baroque sonneteer, tears of the fatherland, vanitas Thirty-Years-War grief
Martin Opitz · 1620s
German early Baroque reformer, imported classical meter, patriotic literary founder
Friedrich von Logau · 1650s
German Baroque epigrammatist, dry witty moral quatrain
Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg · 1660s
Austrian Baroque woman devotional sonnet, mystic gratitude in dense conceit
Hans Sachs · 1560s
Nuremberg Meistersinger shoemaker, doggerel Shrovetide plays, plain civic warmth
Sebastian Brant · 1490s
German Ship of Fools, catalog of human folly in blunt woodcut couplets
Anonymous Nibelungenlied poet · 1200s
Middle High German heroic epic, Siegfried and Kriemhild, doomed feudal grandeur
Anonymous Song of Roland poet · 1100s
Old French chanson de geste, Roncevaux horn, Christian-Saracen feudal martyrdom
Anonymous Poema de Mio Cid poet · 1200s
Castilian epic, exiled Cid's honor and Valencia, plain assonance-strong meter
Anonymous Dream of the Rood poet · 800s
Old English cross-vision, tree speaking of Christ's embrace, tender bright dream-lyric
Anonymous Battle of Maldon poet · 990s
Old English battle fragment, defiant Anglo-Saxon defeat
Aneirin · 600s
early Welsh Y Gododdin, doomed war-band feasted for a year, terse elegiac praise
Taliesin · 600s
early Welsh bard, shape-shifter riddle, mythic prophetic voice
Dafydd ap Gwilym · 1350s
medieval Welsh cywyddwr, love in the woodland, dazzling dyfalu descriptive metaphor-strings
Aogán Ó Rathaille · 1720s
Irish Gaelic aisling dream-vision, ruined Gaelic order, bitter Jacobite lament
Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill · 1770s
Irish keening woman, Lament for Art Ó Laoghaire, oral outpouring at murdered husband
Anonymous Pearl poet · 1380s
Middle English elegy for daughter as pearl in dream-garden, concatenated stanzas
John Skelton · 1520s
Tudor tumbling Skeltonics, Speke Parott, jagged short-line satiric racket
Anonymous Everyman poet · 1490s
late-medieval English morality play, Death's summons, plain allegorical couplet
Anonymous Second Shepherds' Play poet · 1450s
Middle English cycle drama, sheep-stealing farce, tender Nativity comic reverence
John Barbour · 1370s
Scots The Brus, patriotic Bannockburn epic in Northern English couplet
Blind Harry · 1470s
Scots Wallace, legendary patriot romance-epic, muscular oral-rhetorical
Sir David Lyndsay · 1550s
Scots court moralist, Ane Satire of the Thrie Estaitis, sprawling reformist morality play
Allan Ramsay · 1720s
Edinburgh Scots revival, Gentle Shepherd pastoral, urbane vernacular
Robert Fergusson · 1770s
Edinburgh Scots realist, Auld Reikie, urban plainspoken vernacular, model for Burns
James Hogg · 1820s
Ettrick Shepherd, Scots supernatural ballad, uncanny hill-country
Duncan Ban MacIntyre · 1770s
Scottish Gaelic Praise of Ben Dorain, sustained mountain and deer song
Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair · 1750s
Scottish Gaelic Jacobite bard, Birlinn Chlann Raghnaill, muscular sea-voyage in Gaelic
Iain Lom · 1670s
Scottish Gaelic clan bard, panegyric and elegy, terse partisan Highland voice
Mary MacLeod · 1700s
Scottish Gaelic MacLeod bardess, chief-praise and lament, warm clan matriarch
Giacomo da Lentini · 1240s
Sicilian School notary, credited inventor of the sonnet, delicate courtly love
Guittone d'Arezzo · 1280s
Tuscan pre-stilnovo, moralizing sonnets and canzoni, dense civic seriousness
Compiuta Donzella · 1270s
earliest named Italian woman poet, Florentine sonnets refusing marriage for cloister
Bruce Springsteen · 1975
working-class American epic, cars and highways, backstreet romance and grit
Stevie Wonder · 1976
gospel-soul optimism, funky groove, cosmic love, syncopated wonder
Joni Mitchell · 1975
painter's eye, open-tuned confessional jazz-folk, watercolor women
Tom Waits · 1985
junkyard cabaret, whiskey growl, carnival ghosts and rain on tin
Leonard Cohen · 1985
dark liturgical baritone hymns, sacred sex, broken hallelujah
Paul Simon · 1986
literate melodic craft, Graceland global groove, quiet wry wisdom
Elton John · 1975
piano-driven melodic pop grandeur, Bernie Taupin cinematic Americana
Bernie Taupin · 1975
storyteller lyricist behind Elton, western outlaws and rocket men
David Byrne · 1980
twitchy Talking Heads polyrhythm, deadpan philosophical suburbia
Neil Young · 1975
high lonesome cracked tenor, harvest moon, ragged guitar sincerity
Kate Bush · 1985
art-pop witchy soprano, literary Wuthering Heights, running up hills
Peter Gabriel · 1986
art-rock world-music yearning, Sledgehammer soul, In Your Eyes ache
Sting · 1985
Police jazz-pop tension, literate melodic hooks, Roxanne longing
Prince · 1984
purple sensual funk-rock genius, falsetto sex-and-God, minor 7 shimmer
Michael Jackson · 1983
pop kinetic hooks, moonwalk paranoia and joy, Quincy-glossed groove
Madonna · 1985
material dance-pop reinvention, holiday to sex to spiritual
Cyndi Lauper · 1984
she-bop kaleidoscope soprano, time after time tender
Whitney Houston · 1987
gospel-trained pop soprano, I Wanna Dance With Somebody joy
Mariah Carey · 1993
whistle-tone melisma, holiday balladeer, R&B lush
Celine Dion · 1997
power-ballad heart-will-go-on French-Canadian soar
George Michael · 1987
blue-eyed soul yearning, careless whisper, faith and Freedom
Freddie Mercury · 1975
operatic Queen rhapsody, killer queen theatrical camp bombast
Brian May · 1975
guitar-orchestrating Queen anthems, bohemian layered harmonies
Roger Waters · 1979
Pink Floyd concept-album alienation, walls and war grievance
David Gilmour · 1979
Pink Floyd blue-lit guitar lyricism, Comfortably Numb ache
Bono · 1987
U2 anthemic spiritual reach, streets with no name, delay-guitar cathedrals
The Edge · 1987
chiming echoed atmospheric guitar hooks, U2 texture architect
Chris Martin · 2002
Coldplay piano melancholy anthem, yellow stars and fix-you swell
Thom Yorke · 1997
Radiohead paranoid falsetto, glitch alienation, no surprises hush
Jonny Greenwood · 2000
Radiohead sonic architect, orchestral electronic dread beauty
Kurt Cobain · 1991
Nirvana grunge scream-whisper, teen spirit self-loathing hooks
Eddie Vedder · 1991
Pearl Jam gravel baritone, Jeremy alienation, Yellow Ledbetter mumble
Chris Cornell · 1994
Soundgarden Audioslave four-octave grunge blues wail
Layne Staley · 1992
Alice in Chains harmonized dark-junkie sludge dirge
Billy Corgan · 1995
Smashing Pumpkins nasal-melodic sad kids, infinite sadness catharsis
Trent Reznor · 1994
Nine Inch Nails industrial self-loathing, hurt and closer, machine ache
Marilyn Manson · 1996
shock-glam industrial theater, antichrist superstar sneer
Lou Reed · 1975
Velvet-descendant deadpan street poetry, walk on the wild side
Iggy Pop · 1977
proto-punk wild bare-chested primal howl, lust for life
Patti Smith · 1975
punk poet priestess, Horses Rimbaud incantation, Because the Night
Joe Strummer · 1979
Clash punk-reggae political snarl, London calling righteous fury
Joey Ramone · 1976
Ramones two-minute bubblegum-punk shout-along
Debbie Harry · 1980
Blondie new-wave cool sneer, heart of glass disco-punk
Chrissie Hynde · 1980
Pretenders leather-cool alto, brass in pocket swagger
Morrissey · 1985
Smiths crooning celibate melodrama, wry misery flowered
Johnny Marr · 1985
Smiths jangling arpeggiated Rickenbacker melodicism
Robert Smith · 1989
Cure smeared-lipstick goth pop, Friday I'm in Love bittersweet
Ian Curtis · 1980
Joy Division baritone doom, love will tear us apart
Bernard Sumner · 1983
New Order melodic dance-rock melancholy, Blue Monday pulse
Björk · 1995
Icelandic art-pop volcanic microtones, hyperballad glitch soprano
PJ Harvey · 1995
raw blues-punk feminine ferocity, rid of me menace
Fiona Apple · 1997
piano-jazz confessional literate rage, criminal fast-as-you-can
Tori Amos · 1994
red-haired piano confessional myth, Cornflake Girl faerie
Alanis Morissette · 1995
jagged little pill vocal snarl, ironic post-breakup catharsis
Sheryl Crow · 1996
roots-pop everyday roadhouse, all I wanna do sun-warmed
Sarah McLachlan · 1997
Lilith ethereal soprano piano ache, angel arms of an angel
Jewel · 1995
yodel-tinged folk-pop confessional, foolish games plainspoken
Ani DiFranco · 1997
righteous DIY spoken-folk polemic, percussive open-tuned guitar
Beck · 1996
sampledelic slacker collage, loser folk-hip-hop dust-jacket
Elliott Smith · 1998
whispered double-tracked heartbreak, needle in the hay hush
Jeff Buckley · 1994
angelic tenor Hallelujah, lover you should've come over ache
Ryan Adams · 2001
alt-country prolific heartbreak, gold and Heartbreaker melody
Wilco / Jeff Tweedy · 2002
American experimental alt-country, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot static-and-tenderness
Conor Oberst · 2005
Bright Eyes trembling confessional, first day of my life road-verse
Sufjan Stevens · 2005
banjo-orchestral spiritual states, Illinois, Casimir Pulaski Day hush
Bon Iver / Justin Vernon · 2008
cabin falsetto, Skinny Love vulnerable, autotuned choral texture later
Fleet Foxes / Robin Pecknold · 2008
reverbed choral folk harmonies, White Winter Hymnal timeless
Arcade Fire / Win Butler · 2005
orchestral indie catharsis, funeral neighborhood anthems
The National / Matt Berninger · 2007
baritone rain-jacket melancholy, mid-career professional sad
The Strokes / Julian Casablancas · 2001
downtown NYC bored garage cool, Last Nite lo-fi swagger
Interpol / Paul Banks · 2002
post-punk NYC baritone shadow, Obstacle 1 lockstep dread
Yeah Yeah Yeahs / Karen O · 2003
art-punk yelp-and-croon, Maps aching, Zero glitter-snarl
LCD Soundsystem / James Murphy · 2007
dance-punk middle-aged sardonic anthems, all my friends piano loop
M.I.A. · 2007
Sri Lankan Tamil-London electro-agitprop, Paper Planes cash-cocked
Sia · 2014
wig-shrouded pop belt, Chandelier swing-from-the-rafters
Adele · 2011
British torch-soul heartbreak, rolling in the deep pub-piano ache
Amy Winehouse · 2007
Camden retro-soul beehive, rehab horn-lined sass-and-doom
Duffy · 2008
Welsh Motown-revival smoky pop, Mercy shuffle
Norah Jones · 2003
jazz-piano hushed velvety come-away-with-me
Alicia Keys · 2003
piano-driven neo-soul, fallin' churchy pop grandeur
John Mayer · 2003
guitar-nerd blue-eyed pop-blues, wonderland gravity ease
Jack Johnson · 2005
beach acoustic hammock strum, banana pancakes mellow
Jason Mraz · 2008
sunny scat-pop optimism, I'm Yours ukulele grin
Ed Sheeran · 2014
loop-pedal ginger pop-folk, thinking-out-loud wedding sincerity
Sam Smith · 2014
quivering countertenor heartbreak, stay-with-me soul ache
James Blake · 2013
sparse UK electronic soul falsetto, retrograde subwoofer hush
Frank Ocean · 2012
R&B confessional queer romantic haze, Thinkin Bout You elegiac
The Weeknd / Abel Tesfaye · 2015
80s-synth toxic-hedonist R&B falsetto, Blinding Lights neon
Drake · 2013
Toronto sing-rap moody flex, in-my-feelings text-message intimacy
Kanye West · 2010
producer-maximalist ego-soul, gospel-braggart cracked genius
Jay-Z · 2003
Brooklyn hustler-mogul flow, Blueprint retire-rich cool
Eminem · 2000
hyper-syllabic Detroit rage-and-remorse, stan trailer-park catharsis
Nas · 1994
Queensbridge poet-of-the-projects cinematic verse, Illmatic vivid
Notorious B.I.G. · 1995
Brooklyn buttery baritone crime-narrative, Juicy dreams
Tupac Shakur · 1996
thug-poet activist tender-rage, Dear Mama tears-and-fists
Andre 3000 · 2003
OutKast surreal southern-funk shaman, Hey Ya syncopated joy
Kendrick Lamar · 2015
Compton concept-album prophet, alright Pulitzer-poet flow
J. Cole · 2014
Fayetteville introspective rapper-producer, no-role-modelz confessional
Chance the Rapper · 2016
Chicago gospel-rap joyful uplift, Coloring Book praise
Tyler, the Creator · 2019
Odd Future producer-auteur queer flower-boy softness turning rowdy
Childish Gambino / Donald Glover · 2016
Atlanta genre-hopping funk-rap satire, This Is America jolt
Solange · 2016
art-R&B minimalist Black tenderness, Seat at the Table pastel
Beyoncé · 2016
monolithic Houston pop-soul auteur, Lemonade visual-album epic
Rihanna · 2012
Barbadian pop-R&B cool detachment, Umbrella hook mastery
Lady Gaga · 2011
art-pop theatre-kid dance-monster, Born This Way anthemic
Katy Perry · 2010
candy-pop California anthem, firework big-hook cheer
Taylor Swift · 2020
storyteller pop-country auteur, all-too-well cardigan-era literary heartbreak
Lorde · 2013
New Zealand minimalist alto pop, Royals bedroom class-satire
Billie Eilish · 2019
whispered goth-pop teen dread, bad guy bass-drop softness
Finneas O'Connell · 2019
Billie's bedroom-producer co-writer, hushed sub-bass melodic craft
Olivia Rodrigo · 2021
Gen-Z Alanis heartbreak, drivers license diaristic pop-punk
Halsey · 2016
electropop alto anxious romance, Without Me sneer
Lana Del Rey · 2012
cinematic sad-Americana torch, Hollywood Sad Girl string swoon
Mitski · 2018
art-rock diasporic ache, Nobody spinning tragicomic soar
Phoebe Bridgers · 2020
whispered Los Angeles indie-folk gallows humor, Kyoto elegy
Boygenius · 2023
Bridgers/Baker/Dacus harmonized queer indie triangle
Julien Baker · 2017
solo Christian queer confessional, distortion-and-piano vulnerable
Lucy Dacus · 2018
warm contralto narrative indie, Night Shift slow-burn
Angel Olsen · 2016
vintage torch alto reverb, Shut Up Kiss Me Roy Orbison ache
Sharon Van Etten · 2019
smoky Brooklyn indie-rock heartbreak, Seventeen synth-swell
Cat Power / Chan Marshall · 2006
husky Southern minimal piano-blues, The Greatest tender
Jenny Lewis · 2008
Rilo Kiley alt-country-pop wry, Silver Lining Los Angeles glow
Regina Spektor · 2006
Russian-American piano quirk, Fidelity staccato voice-percussion
Ingrid Michaelson · 2008
ukulele indie-pop earnest, The Way I Am wedding-cute
Colbie Caillat · 2007
beach acoustic bubble-pop, Bubbly warm strum
Sara Bareilles · 2013
piano-driven pop belter, Brave gospel-tinged empowerment
Bruno Mars · 2013
retro Motown-funk showman, Uptown Funk 24K sparkle
Justin Timberlake · 2007
post-boyband Timbaland R&B, SexyBack falsetto slink
Pharrell Williams · 2014
Neptunes producer-pop, Happy handclap sunbeam
Robyn · 2010
Swedish crying-on-the-dancefloor synth-pop, Dancing on My Own
Max Martin · 2005
Swedish hit-machine pop craft, chorus-first melodic math
ABBA / Björn & Benny · 1976
Swedish disco-pop major-key melancholy, Dancing Queen
Gloria Estefan · 1988
Miami Sound Machine Latin-pop rhythm and heart
Shakira · 2002
Colombian hip-swinging polyglot pop, hips-don't-lie belly-dance flavor
Selena Quintanilla · 1994
Tejano queen, Bidi Bidi Bom Bom bilingual dance-pop warmth
Juan Gabriel · 1985
Mexican balladeer, Amor Eterno ranchera devotional grand
Rubén Blades · 1980
Panamanian salsa storyteller, Pedro Navaja cinematic barrio
Caetano Veloso · 1978
Brazilian Tropicália art-song, gentle subversive samba-poet
Gilberto Gil · 1977
Bahian Tropicália philosopher, Afro-Brazilian syncopated wisdom
Chico Buarque · 1976
Brazilian MPB literary songwriter, subtle dictatorship-era allegory
Milton Nascimento · 1976
Minas Gerais falsetto choral-jazz, spiritual Clube da Esquina
Astor Piazzolla · 1980
Argentine nuevo tango, bandoneón intellectual sensual
Charly García · 1982
Argentine rock nacional auteur, Sui Generis Serú Girán mercurial
Fito Páez · 1992
Argentine piano rock poet, El amor después del amor bittersweet
Ricky Martin · 1999
Puerto Rican Latin-pop crossover, Livin' La Vida Loca hip-swagger
Enrique Iglesias · 2001
Spanish-language pop balladeer, Hero swelling romance
Rosalía · 2019
Catalan flamenco-pop art auteur, Malamente digital palmas
Bad Bunny · 2022
Puerto Rican reggaeton conquistador, Un Verano Sin Ti breezy melancholy
J Balvin · 2019
Medellín reggaeton pastel-pop, Mi Gente global hook
Daddy Yankee · 2004
reggaeton godfather, Gasolina staccato dembow chant
Karol G · 2023
Colombian reggaeton diva, Bichota confident feminine flex
Peso Pluma · 2023
corridos tumbados Sinaloan nasal narco-ballad
Manu Chao · 1999
Franco-Spanish global patchwork busker-reggae, Clandestino wandering
Willie Nelson · 1978
outlaw-country crooner, phrasing behind the beat, Red Headed Stranger
Waylon Jennings · 1977
outlaw-country baritone twang, Luckenbach honky-tonk swagger
Merle Haggard · 1975
Bakersfield honky-tonk workingman, Okie from Muskogee plainspoken
Dolly Parton · 1976
Smoky Mountain soprano storyteller, Jolene and Coat of Many Colors
Emmylou Harris · 1980
silver-haired Americana harmony queen, plaintive alto grace
John Prine · 1978
wry mailman-poet folk, Angel from Montgomery, common-sense heartbreak
Guy Clark · 1980
Texas songwriter craftsman, L.A. Freeway carved plain wisdom
Townes Van Zandt · 1978
haunted Texas troubadour, Pancho and Lefty gallows-lyric
Steve Earle · 1988
Copperhead-Road hard-country rebel, guitar town rasp
Lucinda Williams · 1998
Louisiana-Southern drawl slow-burn, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road
Gillian Welch · 2001
old-timey Appalachian minimal duo hush, Time (The Revelator)
Alison Krauss · 2004
bluegrass angel soprano, wistful mandolin-fiddle purity
Shania Twain · 1998
country-pop crossover blockbuster, Man! I Feel Like a Woman
Garth Brooks · 1993
stadium-country everyman, Friends in Low Places sing-along
Reba McEntire · 1990
Oklahoma country soprano storyteller, Fancy dramatic ballad
George Strait · 1988
traditional Texas honky-tonk king, plainspoken swing shuffle
Alan Jackson · 1994
Georgia neotraditional country tenor, Chattahoochee summer
Vince Gill · 1995
smooth tenor country balladeer, Go Rest High weeping-guitar
Miranda Lambert · 2010
Texas country-rock firecracker, Kerosene attitude, House That Built Me tender
Chris Stapleton · 2017
gravel-throated country-soul, Tennessee Whiskey slow burn
Kacey Musgraves · 2018
Golden Hour country-pop pastel dreamer, wry Texas wisdom
Zach Bryan · 2023
gravel Oklahoma folk-country diaristic, Something in the Orange ache
Tyler Childers · 2019
Kentucky Appalachian fiddle-and-lament, Feathered Indians hymn-tinged
Sturgill Simpson · 2016
Kentucky psychedelic outlaw country, Metamodern cosmic honky-tonk
Jason Isbell · 2016
Alabama Americana literary-guitar, Cover Me Up recovery-tender
Brandi Carlile · 2018
roots-Americana belter, The Joke soar, Cave-vocal harmony family
Rakim · 1988
internal-rhyme father, laid-back scholarly Long Island flow
KRS-One · 1990
Bronx teacha, Sound of da Police reggae-inflected boom-bap sermon
Chuck D · 1990
Public Enemy political thunder-baritone, Fight the Power siren
Q-Tip · 1993
Tribe Called Quest jazz-rap nasal cool, Bonita Applebum swing
MF DOOM · 2004
masked villain dense-syllable slant-rhyme labyrinth, comic-book grime
Mos Def / Yasiin Bey · 1999
Brooklyn conscious-rap warm baritone, Mathematics preacher-poet
Talib Kweli · 2002
Brooklyn Reflection Eternal literate flow, Get By soul-sample uplift
Common · 2005
Chicago conscious-rap smooth tenor, The Light neo-soul love
Lupe Fiasco · 2008
Chicago high-density metaphor rapper, Kick Push skater-poet
Danny Brown · 2016
Detroit nasal manic gap-toothed party-and-paranoia
Run the Jewels / Killer Mike & El-P · 2016
Atlanta-NYC political detonation duo, industrial boom-bap
Vince Staples · 2017
Long Beach deadpan monotone, Norf Norf minimalist g-funk
Denzel Curry · 2019
Carol City ferocious multi-mode flow, Ricky biographical growl
JID · 2022
Atlanta Dreamville high-speed intricate flow, Surround Sound flex
Rapsody · 2019
North Carolina soulful-conscious woman-hero verse, Eve concept album
Noname · 2018
Chicago spoken-word jazz-rap conscience, Room 25 whispered fire
Little Simz · 2021
North London UK cinematic rap, Introvert orchestral fury
Skepta · 2016
Tottenham grime spare barked flow, Shutdown minimal menace
Stormzy · 2019
South London grime-gospel booming, Blinded by Your Grace churchy
Dave · 2019
South London literate storyteller-rapper piano, Psychodrama therapy
The Notorious B.I.G. · 1994
Brooklyn baritone storyteller, Juicy rags-to-riches, effortless pocket flow
Snoop Dogg · 1993
Long Beach laid-back drawl, G-funk cool, Gin and Juice slow-roll
André 3000 · 2003
OutKast Atlanta psychedelic wordsmith, Hey Ya funk-eccentric, cosmic swing
Big Boi · 2003
OutKast southern-player pimp-swagger flow, dexterous Dungeon Family bounce
Ice Cube · 1992
South Central snarling protest, It Was a Good Day sunlit menace
Ice-T · 1988
LA original gangster reporter-flow, cool pimp-poet street sermon
LL Cool J · 1990
Queens ladies-love charisma, Mama Said Knock You Out boom-bap bravado
Big Daddy Kane · 1988
Brooklyn smooth-operator elegance, Ain't No Half-Steppin' polished bars
Slick Rick · 1988
British-born storyteller with eyepatch, Children's Story fable cadence
GZA · 1995
Wu-Tang Genius chessboard verse, Liquid Swords precise cerebral menace
RZA · 1995
Wu-Tang abbot kung-fu grit, dusty-soul-loop philosopher-general
Ghostface Killah · 2000
Wu-Tang Ironman cinematic slang, purple-tape crime-novella imagery
Raekwon · 1995
Wu-Tang Chef mafioso-rap detail, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx tape-drama
Method Man · 1994
Wu-Tang gravel-voiced charismatic swing, Tical blunted braggadocio
Ol' Dirty Bastard · 1995
Wu-Tang untamed off-key holler, gospel-loon Brooklyn unpredictability
Inspectah Deck · 1997
Wu-Tang Triumph-verse laser precision, dense bookish street imagery
Big Pun · 1998
Bronx Puerto Rican multisyllabic monster, Twinz alliteration-firehose
Big L · 1995
Harlem punchline surgeon, Ebonics playful street-clever, gone-too-soon
Kool G Rap · 1990
Queens mafioso-rap godfather, dense internal-rhyme crime chronicler
Pharoahe Monch · 1999
Queens technical acrobat, Simon Says asthmatic-attack precision
Black Thought · 2018
The Roots Philadelphia bottomless-bar craftsman, Funk Flex 10-minute cypher
Busta Rhymes · 1997
Brooklyn double-time roar, Woo-Hah! elastic Jamaican-inflected chaos
DMX · 1998
Yonkers barked prayer-and-bark, Ruff Ryders growled gospel of pain
Ludacris · 2001
Atlanta cartoon-elastic Southern punchline, Move Bitch horn-honk swagger
Kanye West · 2010
Chicago maximalist producer-rapper confessional, My Beautiful Dark Twisted grandeur
Lil Wayne · 2008
New Orleans metaphor-machine raspy Martian, Tha Carter III surreal punchlines
Pusha T · 2018
Virginia coke-rap immaculate cold, Daytona seven-track surgical
Freddie Gibbs · 2019
Gary Indiana gangster-poet crisp pocket, Bandana Madlib-jazz menace
Roc Marciano · 2010
Long Island loop-less mafioso whisper, luxurious minimalist crime verse
Ka · 2016
Brownsville monk-like conservationist, Honor Killed the Samurai hushed sword-parables
MC Lyte · 1988
Brooklyn pioneering woman-MC baritone, Cha Cha Cha battle-cool
Queen Latifah · 1993
Newark regal U.N.I.T.Y. dignity, jazzy hip-hop womanist authority
Missy Elliott · 2001
Virginia futurist wordplay, Get Ur Freak On Timbaland-glitch playful reinvention
Nicki Minaj · 2010
Queens Trinidadian shape-shift alter-egos, Monster verse cartoon menace
Cardi B · 2018
Bronx unfiltered charisma, Bodak Yellow trap-drill braggadocio
Megan Thee Stallion · 2020
Houston knee-deep confident Southern flow, Savage hot-girl swagger
Doja Cat · 2020
LA genre-bending pop-rap chameleon, Say So disco-flirt playful
Tyler, the Creator · 2019
Odd Future turned auteur, IGOR falsetto-and-growl heartbreak collage
Earl Sweatshirt · 2018
LA dense-mumbled introspective, Some Rap Songs jazz-loop grief
Mac Miller · 2018
Pittsburgh warm sensitive stoner-poet, Swimming jazzy self-reckoning
Anderson .Paak · 2016
Oxnard singer-rapper-drummer sunshine funk, Malibu neo-soul groove
Aesop Rock · 2007
New York abstract dense-vocab labyrinth, None Shall Pass cryptic imagery
Westside Gunn · 2020
Griselda Buffalo art-world coke-rap ad-libs, luxury-menace fashion-fetish
Benny the Butcher · 2020
Griselda Buffalo cold measured street-veteran, Plugs I Met sober flex
Conway the Machine · 2020
Griselda Buffalo grizzled scarred flow, God Don't Make Mistakes survival grit
Nate Dogg · 1994
Long Beach G-funk sung-hook baritone, Regulate cool-blue melodic anchor
Dr. Dre · 1995
G-funk Compton production king, Chronic bass-and-whistle Cali dread
Missy Elliott · 2001
Virginia futurist-funk playful reinvention, Get Ur Freak On
Timbaland · 2002
Virginia producer syncopated stutter-beat, breath-and-click groove
Rick Rubin · 1990
producer-as-Zen-monk minimalism, strip-to-essence rock-hip-hop bridge
Björn Ulvaeus · 1976
ABBA lyricist Swedish major-key melancholy hooks
George Michael (Wham!) · 1984
Wake-Me-Up-Before-You-Go-Go bright saxy pop craft
Phil Collins · 1985
gated-reverb drums, In The Air Tonight everyman ballad soar
Don Henley · 1985
Eagles-solo California cynicism, Boys of Summer synth-melancholy
Glenn Frey · 1977
Eagles country-rock west-coast, Take It Easy laid-back
Fleetwood Mac / Stevie Nicks · 1977
gauzy witchy alto, Rhiannon shawl-twirl mystic pop
Christine McVie · 1977
Fleetwood Mac warm British piano-pop, Songbird tender
Lindsey Buckingham · 1977
Fleetwood Mac fingerpicked twitchy pop-craftsman, Go Your Own Way
Steely Dan / Fagen & Becker · 1977
Sardonic jazz-rock cocktail-lounge cynicism, Aja immaculate
Van Morrison · 1975
Belfast Celtic-soul mystic scat, Astral Weeks Moondance rapture
Rickie Lee Jones · 1980
beatnik jazz-pop street-scat, Chuck E's in Love bohemian
Randy Newman · 1978
New Orleans piano ironist, Sail Away short-people satire, Toy Story warmth
Warren Zevon · 1978
literate West-Coast cynic rocker, Werewolves of London wry doom
Jackson Browne · 1976
Laurel Canyon confessional pianist, Running on Empty road-weary
James Taylor · 1975
gentle acoustic New England tenor, Fire and Rain hush
Carole King · 1976
Tapestry pianist songwriter, You've Got a Friend warm domestic
Carly Simon · 1977
New York smart-woman confessional pop, You're So Vain sneer
Cat Stevens / Yusuf · 1975
British acoustic seeker, Wild World gentle Peace-Train warmth
Nick Drake · 1975
posthumous English hushed melancholic fingerpicking, Pink Moon
Nick Cave · 1997
Australian gothic-crooner priest, Into My Arms baritone hymn

Punctuation reference

What every punctuation mark does to the music.

SymbolNameEffect
,Comma
Adds one extra beat of music after the word. Does NOT change the chord.
e.g. Hold my hand, close your eyes
.Period
Adds one extra beat AND starts a new chord segment that keeps the same root note.
e.g. We danced. Then we sang.
; :Semicolon / Colon
Breaks the chord segment and moves to a new chord.
e.g. Night falls; stars appear
!Exclamation
Plays the last syllable of the word LOUDER (accent).
e.g. Run!
?Question mark
Last syllable lands on the 2nd, 4th or 9th of the chord — an unresolved, questioning tone.
e.g. Where are you?
~Tilde
Adds vibrato to every note in the word.
e.g. Sing~ to me
\Backslash
Portamento — glides smoothly to the first note of the next word.
e.g. Slide\ down

Special symbols

Dashes, brackets, digits, and instrumental markers.

SymbolNameEffect
-Dash (instrumental tick)
Each dash is one silent beat that triggers its own chord. A line of '- - - -' plays four chords with no vocals.
e.g. - - - -
-Hyphen inside a word
Forces a syllable split. 'ev-er' counts as two syllables instead of one.
e.g. ev-er-y
[ ... ]Brackets
Words inside brackets are sung legato (slurred together).
e.g. [softly falling] rain
1–9Digit in a word
Forces the pitch height of that word (1 = lowest, 9 = highest in the chord).
e.g. high5 low1
instrumentalInstrumental marker
The literal word 'instrumental' takes no beats and produces no chord — it's a silent label only.
e.g. instrumental
New line
Each line of lyrics starts on the downbeat of a new drum loop bar.

Chord roman numerals

Roman-numeral chord shorthand and examples in C.

RomanQualityExample (key of C)
IMajor triadC
iiMinor triadDm
iiiMinor triadEm
IVMajor triadF
VMajor triadG
viMinor triadAm
vii°Diminished triadBdim
iMinor triadCm
ivMinor triadFm
vMinor triadGm
VIMajor triadA♭
VIIMajor triadB♭
IIIMajor triadE♭
IIMajor triadD
♭IIMajor triadC♯
Diminished triadCdim