"'Lyric' in contemporary literary criticism is a term as elusive as it is suggestive. It exists both as an adjective, expressing a poetic quality, and as a noun denoting a poetic mode, and both are notoriously difficult to define. It is this protean quality that has allowed 'lyric' to become a powerful creative stimulus for both poets and theorists. A foundational period for today's sense of 'lyric' was the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century"--