Marion Thain is Reader in English Literature and Culture at Sheffield University. She has published primarily on late-nineteenth-century poetry and poetics, and is author of 'Michael Field': Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge, 2007).

• Introduction Marion Thain; 1. 'Words for music, perhaps': early modern songs and lyric David Lindley; 2. Neither here nor there: deixis and the sixteenth-century sonnet Heather Dubrow; 3. 'Trewly wrote': manuscript, print and the lyric in the early seventeenth century Thomas Healy; 4. Lyric and the English revolution Nigel Smith; 5. Modulation and expression in the lyric ode, 1660–1750 David Fairer; 6. Eighteenth-century high lyric: William Collins and Christopher Smart Marcus Walsh; 7. The retuning of the sky: Romanticism and lyric David Duff; 8. Victorian lyric pathology and phenomenology Marion Thain; 9. Modernism and the limits of lyric Peter Nicholls; 10. The lyric 'I' in late-twentieth-century English poetry Neil Roberts; 11. No man is an I: recent developments in the lyric Ian Patterson; Afterword Jonathan Culler.

'… a carefully crafted collection.' The Times Literary Supplement