The Introduction sketches the alteration of lyric’s place in the nineteenth century. Poetry, which had been a primary purveyor of wisdom and consolation for a relatively homogenous society grounded in Christian belief, becomes a print commodity confronting a society in which contending beliefs—including beliefs in rationalism, science, and progress—have rendered naïve belief and the forms of wisdom and consolation that might attend it unavailable to writers like Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson who were acutely attuned to their times and sensed the hollowness of the discourses around them. They did not abandon lyric, but modernized it. The end of art—as Hegel put it—as the primary vehicle for belief or spirit does not mean the end of lyric but a proliferation of poetic practices and a turn from the conveyance of meaning to the interrogation of language and received ideas, a revolution in poetic language evident in the work of these three U. S. poets, which puts them near the advent of modernity in poetry.
