What this chamber argues

• Before prose, before philosophy, before history as a discipline, there was verse: the oldest surviving literature on every continent is poetry.
• Lyric is the hexagonal gallery of compression — the world's cultures each distilled memory, devotion, and longing into measured lines meant to be sung.

Primary works in this chamber (16)

• Hesiod — Works and Days (c. 700 BCE) — Book
• Anonymous — Classic of Poetry (Shijing) (c. 1000–600 BCE) — Book
• Various Japanese poets — Manyoshu (c. 759 CE) — Book
• Ferdowsi — Shahnameh (1010) — Book
• Hafez — Divan (14th century) — Book
• Rumi — Masnavi (13th century) — Book
• Dante Alighieri — The Divine Comedy (c. 1320) — Book
• Sappho — Poems (c. 600 BCE) — Book
• Pindar — Odes (c. 470 BCE) — Book
• Horace — Complete Works (c. 23 BCE) — Book
• Li Po — The Works of Li Po, the Chinese Poet (8th century) — Book
• Omar Khayyam — Rubaiyat (12th century) — Book
• Dante Alighieri — The New Life (La Vita Nuova) (c. 1294) — Book
• Walt Whitman — Leaves of Grass (1855) — Book
• Emily Dickinson — Poems (1890) — Book
• Rabindranath Tagore — Gitanjali (1912) — Book

Connected chambers

• Epics — Lyric and epic are the two halves of early verse: the epic carries the long heroic narrative, the lyric the single charged moment. The same metrical instinct underlies both.
• Writing Fiction and Poetry — The craft hexagonal gallery holds the theory — Aristotle's Poetics, Horace's Ars Poetica, Tom Hood on versification — of the very art this hexagonal gallery collects in practice.
• Wisdom Literature — The Shijing's odes and the Psalms sit on the seam between poetry and counsel: verse that teaches, the lyric as proverb set to music.
• First Plays — Greek tragedy, the Noh, and the Persian taʿziya are verse drama — poetry staged. The lyric chorus is the bridge between the page and the theatre.