Lyric poetry in ancient Greece was distinguished by its form meter and occasion context of compositionperformance . You usually here about Greek poetry dividing into a few main genres epic , lyric and tragedy are the main ones along with iambic , elegy , epigrams , and some others . Epic poetry , such as the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey , were long narratives on mythic themes . A singer would recite the poems with some kind of percussive or droning string intstrument to help keep time the poetry would be in the dactylic hexameter meter , a stately cadence with enough flexibility that it is suitable for extended narration . Iambs are short poems in the punchy iambic meters , and elegies are more sententious poems for recitation that alternate hexameters with pentameters . Lyric poetry , as its name suggests , was poetry meant to be sung to musical accompaniment the lyre , hence lyric . It could be either monody a solo singer or a chorus . There ' s a wide variety of lyric meters , meant to be variable and expressive . Lyric poems run the gamut of soldier songs eg Tyrtaeus , songs for civic or religious festivals Alcman , victory odes Pindar and Bacchylides , or songs of personal feeling Alcaeus , Sappho . So there ' s a variety of poems that all get styled lyric . In antiquity , there were nine lyric poets considered canonical , so when you read about Greek lyric poetry , or open a lyric poetry anthology , you ' re most likely going to see poems by Alcman , Alcaeus , Anacreon , Sappho , Stesichorus , Ibycus , Pindar , and Bacchylides . There wasn ' t a lot of welldeveloped theory of genre in antiquity so there ' s not really a major source to go back to for the distinction . Rather , poets were simply known as one thing or another an epic singer vs a lyre singer or a monodist vs a choral poet and so on . If you want a reference for these distinctions look up either the bibliography at the end of the entry for lyric in the Oxford Classical dictionary , or the relevant chapters in the first volume of the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism .