Poems, though they might be lent to music, always struck me as an essay stripped down to essential meaning. I also associate poems with the elite, the reading class. Lyrics, with their rhymed storytelling, seemed more for the proletariat, particularly before formal education was widespread. The rhyming (a la Shakespeare's couplets) help the illiterate remember the refrain.
Then again, as much of art grew out of its association with ritualized worship, perhaps the lyric was a devotional meant to be used to express joy or pleasure whereas poems were more serious worship tomes.
Whatever, I think the distinction became blurred somewhere in the 1960s with the rise of the singer-songwriter recording artists like Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell or Gil Scott Heron whose words could stand on their own without music and be utterly coherent and even transcendent art, like poems. I don't think that happened often in popular music prior to this. And now we use the terms interchangeably much the same way we comingle "soda" and "pop" for that tingly refreshment.
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