Definition of "melic" []

• Of or relating to verse that is intended to be sung, especially Greek lyric verse of the seventh to fifth century B.C. (adjective)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "Lyric poetry, properly defined, was a distinct branch of what was classified as "melic" poetry (the term roughly translates as "melody" or "air"), strictly differentiated from poetic genres that were meant to be recited without instrumentation or performed with other instruments such as the flute and the oboe-like aulos."
• "The symposium was a clubby bastion of the aristocratic male citizenry, but as Ewen Bowie writes in The Oxford History of the Classical World, "melic poetry was at home everywhere," and there is evidence to suggest that rounds of lyric poetry became a standard form of entertainment at after-dinner soirees all across the Aegean archipelago."
• "Here we have the smooth-stalked meadow grass, and here is the hedge wood-melic grass, with its slightly drooping panicle, and spikelets on long slender footstalks."