Lyric poems have a musical rhythm, and their topics often explore romantic feelings or other strong emotions. You can usually identify a lyric poem by its musicality: if you can imagine singing it, it's probably lyric. In ancient Greece and Rome, lyric poems were in fact sung to the strums of an accompanying lyre. It's the word lyre, in fact, that is at the root of lyric; the Greek lyrikos means "singing to the lyre."