The Challenges of Orpheus

This critical exploration of how we define lyric poetry is “thorough, penetrating, and on the cutting edge of contemporary scholarship” ( Choice ). As a literary mode “lyric” is difficult to define. The term is conventionally applied to brief, songlike poems expressing the speaker’s interior thoughts, but many critics have questioned the underlying assumptions of this definition. While many people associate lyric with the Romantic era, Heather Dubrow turns instead to the poetry of early modern E