SOURCE: Sister Mary Arthur Knowlton, "Rolle's Lyrics," in The Influence of Richard Rolle and of Julian of Norwich on the Middle English Lyrics, Mouton, 1973, pp. 49-70.

In the excerpt below, Knowlton sets out her basic reading of Rolle, noting the features that she considers definitive of his verse.

Lyric poetry, among the Greeks, meant poetry to be sung to the accompaniment of the lyre. Professor Frye suggests in the Anatomy of Criticism that the Greek word for lyric would be more meaningfully translated "poems to be chanted",¹ since the emphasis should be placed on the words, not on the music. The lyric is now generally found to be defined in some such terms as those used by M. L. Rosenthal and A. J. Smith in Exploring Poetry, namely, "a brief, unified expression of emotion in words as melodious as possible".² The best lyrics are necessarily brief since they...