Description:
Offering a new thesis for why so many modern English poems begin with a lonely wanderer experiencing a private emotion, Dolan (rhetoric, U. of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand) argues that the modern lyric poem evolved as an adaptation to the demand for truth in poetry by post- Reformation English readers. That demand, he says, led to a preference for poems grounded in verifiable public occasions such as deaths, battles, and weddings, but by the middle of the 18th century the notion of poetic occasion had broadened to include the death of strangers and unverifiable mental events.
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