Definition of Subject and General Semantics

 iv.2.1.Literary style is commonly defined as “the manner of linguistic expression in prose or verse – as how speakers or writers say whatever it is that they say” (Abrams and Harpham 2015, 383). By extension, beyond the domains of literature and language, style refers to ways of doing, acting or behaving: Jeffrey Dolven (2016, 346) has described style as “the way something is done or made: not the what, but the how; not the method, but the manner.” In the context of poetic expression, this “how” presupposes a choice between different ways of accomplishing one’s poetic goals (see Gumbrecht 2003). Style can be distinguished from terms such as ‘form,’ ‘genre,’ or ‘mode’ “by its intimate relationship to language and the art of verbal construction” (Hartley 2020). In lyric poetry, style can refer to a given poem’s form more generally, including such features as line length, prosody, use of multimedia components, and line distribution (see Tiffany 2020). However, whereas ‘form’ refers to all the structural element, in opposition to ‘content,’ stylistic analysis typically focuses on formal elements that stand out in a text or that are ‘foregrounded’ (see Verdonk 2002, 6). Additionally, ‘genre’ denotes types or classes of texts that are grouped together according to social conventions with respect to their form, content, or style (see Abrams and Harpham 2015, 149), whereas ‘mode’ refers to a way of expressing things that may cut across genres (e.g., a fictional, satirical mode, see also Hempfer 2003).

 iv.2.2.Style can be used as a normative category, a descriptive category, or both. On the descriptive level, it can be used to characterise different aspects of a literary work, such as rhetorical situation, choice of words (or diction), sentence structure (i.e., syntax), or figurative language (see Abrams and Harpham 2015, 383, as well as the list of stylistic devices and examples further below). The term “style” can also be used to refer to the distinctive voice of an individual author, as well as to common features that prevailed in a particular period or that defined a literary movement or distinctive genre. More specifically, style can be defined on the basis of similarities between a given text and a precursor work (e.g., a “biblical” style) or by its institutional association (e.g., “scientific” or “essayistic” ways of writing) (see Abrams and Harpham 2015, 384). On the broader cultural level, style can be perceived as an achievement or used as a compliment (as in “doing something in style”) or it can refer to a (passing) trend in design, music, or fashion (see Dolven 2016, 346).
Today, the concept “style” is mostly used in a descriptive sense, but it has also been used normatively or prescriptively to indicate the suitability of a style with respect to a given rhetorical situation, topic, or genre (i.e., Greek πρέπον/prépon, Latin decorum; see Lausberg 1990a, §§1055–1062) – which means that both textual demands (internal aptum) and contextual factors, such as speaker and audience (external aptum), should be taken into account ( Lausberg 1990a, §§1055–1057). In ancient rhetoric, the discussion of style as the manner of expressing something is linked to generic division, the so-called genera dicendi or elocutionis (pl., Latin for ‘types of expression’; see Lausberg 1990a, §§1078–1082). According to Cicero (Orator, 75–100), there are three such stylistic levels – high (lat. genus grande / sublime / grandiloquum), middle (lat. medium), and low (lat. Humilis) – with each level offering rhetorical strategies suited to different situations (see Dolven 2016, 347; Cicero 2014). Such traditional definitions of style that link it to collective value judgements (e.g., what is regarded as the best style?) seem to be at odds with more modern approaches to style that stress its potential for individual self-expression. In fact, in antiquity, the Latin word stilus (meaning “pen”) was not primarily associated with one’s manner of writing. Occasionally, the turning of the pen (in the literal sense of stilum vertere; see Horace, Satires 1,10) is mentioned, since the turning movement made it possible to erase what had already been written on the wax tablet with the opposite end of the writing tool, which was rounded (see Gumbrecht 1986, 731). For this reason, it came to be associated with editing texts. Nonetheless, stilus metonymically contains the notion of an individual’s signature (see Dolven 2016, 347), and this emphasis on the individuality of expression grows more distinct starting from the late eighteenth century. Given its capacity to help classify literature based on either commonly shared norms or individual features, style can serve as a marker of similarities and differences between schools, writers, and periods.

 iv.2.3.The term ‘style’ is applicable to all genres of literary production. Thus, in order to understand its specific meaning and relevance for the analysis of lyric poetry (see Burdorf 2009), it is necessary to briefly reflect on its generic peculiarities (à lyric as mode or genre), given that lyric poetry has occasionally been defined in terms of stylistic features. For instance, a lyric poem has been defined as “a short poem concerned with an isolated or singular experience” (Brewster 2009, 6), with the shortness of much lyric poetry being linked to “to the brevity of the human behaviour it depicts” (Elder Olson qtd. in Brewster 2009, 6). A tendency towards brevity (see Müller-Zettelmann 2000, 73–83) goes hand in hand with a distinctive linguistic quality of lyric verse, namely its “unique intensification of literary language distinct from everyday experience” (Brewster 2009, 6). This observation underpins the definition of lyric offered by Andrew Welsh, who refers to it simply as “a distinctive way of organising language,” rather than as a genre (qtd. in Brewster 2009, 2). In a similar vein, Daniel Tiffany (2020) points to “lyric poetry’s reflexive orientation towards language itself,” insofar as “lyric poetry, unlike narrative fiction or dramatic texts, is always obliquely concerned with the being of language in a foundational sense […].” Zymner (2017, 151; 2009), for his part, proposes that we understand lyric poetry as a transhistorical concept, encompassing a wide range of different medial forms (oral and written, fictional and non-fictional, etc.) that function as a “display” of what language can accomplish.

 iv.2.4.Given this compression of meaning into a relatively small number of words and the resulting semantic density of these words, word choice (or diction) seems to matter much more in lyric poetry than in other genres. In general terms, diction refers to “the kinds of words, phrases, and sentence structures, and sometimes also figurative language, that constitute any work of literature” (Abrams and Harpham 2015, 297), which also includes distinct uses of language (e.g., multilingualism, sociolects, and dialects). Historically speaking, ideals of diction have been variable and have affected the semantic or syntactic choices made by a given author. Diction can be general or specific, abstract or concrete, formal or informal, referential or emotive (see Corbett 1990, 404). In the case of lyric poetry, where language is often called upon to convey a heightened experience, diction often implies a distinctive use of language that stands apart from the common language in use in a given period.

 iv.2.5.Style also refers to stylistic devices, i.e., both tropes and schemes. The process through which, since the Early Modern period, rhetoric (along with style) has come to be restricted to a limited set of stylistic devices, among which metaphor is clearly the most important, has been labelled a “rhétorique restrainte” (‘restrained rhetoric’) by Genette (1970). Genette criticised the rhétorique restrainte for its selective criteria that are influenced by changing ideas about appropriate style and its effects.

 iv.2.6.Important glossaries of stylistic figures and tropes can be found in various languages, e.g., Fontanier (1977) for French, Lausberg (1990a, 1990b) for German, and Mortara Garavelli (2010) for Italian. In the following selective and simplified list, we limit ourselves to examples in English, French, German, Italian, and Latin. Unless otherwise specified, the definitions are taken from Corbett (1990).

 iv.2.7.Tropes relate to semantics (French: figures sémantiques; German: Uneigentlichkeit, Tropen, Bildlichkeit; Italian: traslati; figure di significato). A trope is a “figure of speech that uses a word or phrase in a sense other than what is proper to it” (Bahti and Mann 2016, 377). They “allow language to mean more or something other” (Bahti and Mann 2016, 378).

Tropes

 iv.2.8.
• Allegory 1
  A narrative or didactic literary genre in which meaning is constituted by reference to a second level of meaning. (Blank 1997, 44)

Animals as allegories of sins at the beginning of Dante’s Divina Commedia.

John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) as an allegory of Christian life.

 iv.2.9.
• Allegory 2, metaphora continua
  An extended metaphor (Quint., Inst. or. 8.6.44). For ‘metaphor,’ see below.

O navis, referent in mare te novi
fluctus: o quid agis? (Horace, carmen 1,14)

 iv.2.10.
• Hyperbole
  The use of exaggerated terms for the purpose of emphasis or heightened effect. (Corbett 1990, 451)

An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes […] (Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”)

 iv.2.11.
• Litotes
  Deliberate use of understatement, not to deceive but to make what is said more impressive. (Corbett 1990, 452)

Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind. (Philip Larkin, “Talking in Bed”)

 iv.2.12.
• Metaphor
  An implied comparison between two things dissimilar in nature that nonetheless have something in common. (Corbett 1990, 444)

I’m a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house (Sylvia Plath, “Metaphors”)

 iv.2.13.
• Metonymy
  The substitution of an attributive or suggestive word for what is actually meant. (Corbett 1990, 448)

All eyes on me (Tupac Shakur et al.)

 iv.2.14.
• Onomatopoeia
  The use of words whose sound echoes the sense. (Corbett 1990, 455)

Das Wasser rauscht, das Wasser schwoll (J.W. Goethe, “Der Fischer”)

 iv.2.15.
• Oxymoron
  The yoking together of two terms that are ordinarily contradictory. (Corbett 1990, 456)

Vergine madre, figlia del tuo figlio (Dante, Paradiso, canto XXXIII)

 iv.2.16.
• Periphrasis, circumlocution
  A roundabout expression that avoids using the most direct name for a thing. (Parks and Arthos 2013)

the feather’d choir (Robert Fergusson, “Elegy on the Death of Scots Music”)

 iv.2.17.
• Puns
  A generic name for those figures which make a play on words. (Corbett 1990, 447)

Therefore I lie with her, and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flattered be. (William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 88”)

 iv.2.18.
• Personification or prosopopoeia
  Investing abstractions or inanimate objects with human qualities or abilities. (Corbett 1990, 450, see also Paxson 1994)

Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me (Emily Dickinson, “Because I could not stop for Death”)

 iv.2.19.

• Simile/comparison (German: Vergleich)
  An explicit comparison between two things of unlike nature that yet have something in common. (Corbett 1990, 444)

Das Leben liegt in aller Herzen / Wie in Särgen (Else Lasker-Schüler, “Weltenende”)

 iv.2.20.

• Symbol
  An expression has both a literal and a figurative meaning; the latter is assigned by custom or familiarity (see Leech 1991, 162)

“Lines inscribed upon a cup formed from a skull” (title of poem by Lord George Gordon Byron)

 iv.2.21.

• Synecdoche
  A figure of speech in which a part stands for the whole. (Corbett 1990, 445)

When by thy scorn, O murd’ress, I am dead
[…]
Then shall my ghost come to thy bed,
and thee, feign’d vestal, in worse arms shall see (John Donne, “The Apparition”)

 iv.2.22.Schemes are related to the sentence structure, letters, and sound (French: figures syntaxiques and figures phoniques; German: rhetorische Figuren; Italian: figure di parola and figure di pensiero). They constitute a “general category of figurative language that includes any artful deviation from the ordinary arrangement of words” (Mann 2016, 319). This results in syntactical rearrangements that can include word order (e.g., anastrophe), the omission and repetition of words (e.g., asyndeton and anaphora), or grammatical structures (e.g., parallelisms and antitheses) (see Mann 2016, 319).

Schemes of balance

 iv.2.23.
• Antithesis
  The juxtaposition of contrasting ideas, often in a parallel structure. (Corbett 1990, 429)

By force to win, he mediates the way,
By force to ravish, or by fraud betray (Alexander Pope, “The Rape of the Lock”)

 iv.2.24.
• Parallelism
  Similarity of structure in a pair or series of related words, phrases, or clauses. (Corbett 1990, 428)

Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare (Dante, “Vita nova”)

Schemes of unusual or inverted word order

 iv.2.25.
• Anastrophe, inversion
  The inversion of the natural or usual word order. (Corbett 1990, 431)

Sah ein Knab ein Röslein stehn (J.W. Goethe, “Heidenröslein”)

 iv.2.26.
• Parenthesis
  The insertion of a verbal unit into a position that interrupts the normal syntactical flow of the sentence. (Corbett 1990, 431)

Ich sei, gewährt mir die Bitte,
In eurem Bunde der Dritte. (Friedrich Schiller, “Die Bürgschaft”)

 iv.2.27.
• Epithet (epitheton)
  A descriptive attribute, often an adjective (see Lausberg 1990a,§308–314). Epitheta ornantia denote an accumulation of attributes.

Eichne Tür, wer hob dich aus den Angeln?
Meine sanfte Mutter kann nicht kommen (Paul Celan, “Espenbaum”)

Schemes of omission

 iv.2.28.
• Anacoluthon
  A change of construction in the middle of a sentence that leaves the beginning uncompleted.

AUGENBLICKE, wessen Winke,
keine Helle schläft. (Paul Celan, “Augenblicke”)

 iv.2.29.
• Anadiplosis (German: Anadiplose)
  The repetition of the last word of a clause at the beginning of the following clause. (Corbett 1990, 440)

Die Blätter fallen, fallen wie von weit [...] (Rainer Maria Rilke, “Herbst”)

 iv.2.30.
• Asyndeton
  The deliberate omission of conjunctions between a series of related clauses. (Corbett 1990, 434)

All whom war, death, age, agues, tyrannies
Despair, law, chance hath slain [...]. (John Donne, Holy Sonnet “At the round earth’s”)

 iv.2.31.
• Ellipsis
  The deliberate omission of a word or of words which are implied by the context. (Corbett 1990, 433)

Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.(Virginia Woolf, The Waves)

Schemes of repetition

 iv.2.32.
• Alliteration
  The repetition of initial or medial consonants in two or more adjacent words. (Corbett 1990, 436)

Pour qui sont ces serpents qui sifflent sur vos têtes ? (Racine, Andromaque)

 iv.2.33.
• Anaphora
  The repetition of the same word or group of words at the beginning of successive clauses. (Corbett 1990, 437)

Il y aura des fleurs tant que vous en voudrez
Il y aura des fleurs couleur de l’avenir (Louis Aragon, “Je vous salue ma France…”)

 iv.2.34.
• Assonance
  The repetition of similar vowel sounds, preceded and followed by different consonants, in syllables of adjacent words—specifically on stressed syllables in languages with accentual metrics (e.g., English and German). (Corbett 1990, 437)

Ô lac, l'année à peine a fini sa carrière (Alphonse de Lamartine, “Le lac”)

 iv.2.35.
• Climax (gradatio)
  A figure in which a number of propositions or ideas are set forth in a series, in which each one is more forceful than the last. (OED)

Ich küsse, umschlinge und presse dich wild (Heinrich Heine, Lyr. Intermezzo XXXII)

 iv.2.36.
• Chiasmus
  The reversal of grammatical structures in successive phrases or clauses. (Corbett 1990, 443)

Pace non trovo, et non ò da far guerra (Petrarch, Rerum vulgaria fragmenta 134)

 iv.2.37.
• Polyptoton
  The repetition of words derived from the same root. (Corbett 1990, 443)

di me medesmo meco mi vergogno (Petrarch, Rerum vulgaria fragmenta 1)

 iv.2.38.The purpose of stylistic devices is to enhance the effect of the writing: “Because figures can render our thoughts vividly concrete, they help us to communicate with our audience clearly and effectively; because they stir emotional responses, they can carry truth […] and because they elicit admiration for the eloquence of the speaker or writer, they can exert a powerful ethical appeal” (Corbett 1990, 424).

The Subject in Context

 iv.2.39.Style entails conscious or unconscious choices made by the author that affect the syntax, diction, and rhetorical figures used in the text. Just how freely these choices can be made on the individual level depends strongly on the historical context. Throughout the history of Western poetics, there have been periods when writers were expected to adhere more closely to literary convention and rules, in which the production and appreciation of what was deemed good literature was defined by strict guidelines, often subsumed into poetological works or rhetorical manuals.

 iv.2.40.Bearing in mind that an independent genre known as lyric poetry was first established during the Italian Renaissance, one can also speak of an incipient reflection on how poetry can be written from the Renaissance period onwards (see Mazzoni 2005, see also Mazzoni 2022; see below ¶47). After the following introductory sections, we will sketch the stylistic developments that occurred in Italian, French, English, and German poetics from the Renaissance onwards, that is, in those periods in which a conscious reference to a modern idea of lyric poetry is conceivable.

 iv.2.41.Even though this article addresses style in lyric poetry, this should not imply that there is a distinct lyrical style. In fact, looking at style in context reveals the wide historical and contemporary range of lyrical expression, which suggests that there are no specific stylistic patterns that would set lyric apart from other genres. Not only is lyric poetry expected to be different from everyday speech, but, in line with Ezra Pound’s modernist imperative to “make it new” (the title of an essay collection by Pound published in 1934), many 20^th- and 21^st-century poets have insisted that poems should break with established literary patterns and traditions. Besides, there is considerable formal diversity: Many poems look different at first sight. For instance, various poems of the digital age display an elaborate layout and multimodality (i.e. integration of various semiotic channels such as image or sound; Mediality and Materiality of Lyric), so that these poems tend to differ markedly in their appearance from all historical predecessors, at least more so than is the case with most narrative texts. Surprisingly, the tendency towards innovative lyric expression still allows demonstrative returns to traditionalist forms of rhyme and metre (Rhythm, Metre, Line), but also to lyric poems that employ a humble style. Moreover, the attention to language, its literary and everyday use, which we can find in many poems, fosters intertextual references to different poetic material and linguistic registers. Many poems thus present themselves as a stylistically heterogeneous mixture of different voices (see Larsen 2021). In this respect, poetry does not appear to be a monologic genre, as Bakhtin (1981, 275–301) conceived it in contrast to dialogically oriented prose and specifically the novel, but is a genre that entertains forms of hybridisation with other genres and discourses (see Ramazani 2014).

 iv.2.42.Behind these superficial observations of stylistic heterogenity of lyric poetry lie far-reaching developments in modernist lyric poetry since the turn of the 20^th century. At least since the avant-gardes of Modernism, deviating – not only from everyday language, but specifically from established patterns of poetic expression – became a central stylistic goal. Russian formalism in particular provided the theoretical foundation for this stylistic ideal by establishing the effect of poetic language through defamiliarisation (see below ¶72). Modernist lyric poetry is said to pursue defamiliarisation or stylistic deviation to such an extent that it makes poetry difficult for the reader. This evokes Roland Barthes’ notion of the “writerly text” (in contrast to the “readerly text,” as first introduced in S/Z in 1970; see Barthes 1982). Some critics claim that following symbolism an obscure style became a general stylistic feature of lyric poetry (see Hugo Friedrich 1956, see below ¶69). However, such pointed generalisations fail to take into account the stylistic range of Modernist poetry. Most importantly, an explanation of defamiliarisation in terms of stylistic elitism overlooks the manifold conditions that contributed to the transformation of lyric poetry. The sweeping change in mentality in the Modern Age (i.e. acceleration of technological and social change, experience of alienation from the world, see Rosa 2010) discarded the idea that the precepts from the past could cope with the unprecedented challenges of the present. In literature, the ambivalence of these developments shows in studies on the connection between language and perception (see Altieri 2006), or the persuasion concepts of advertising and propaganda (see Müller 2023, 300–302), which have revealed new potentials for language. At the same time, these findings have shaken up traditional certainties, as established doctrines of poetics and rhetoric have lost their validity, rendering the self-evident functioning of language even doubtful. In this respect, modernity may also be described as a multifaceted experience of crises, also in literature (see below Mallarmé’s crise de vers, ¶57; see also language crisis ¶69).

 iv.2.43.As modernist poetry favours poetic objectivity over subjective expression, it promotes stylistically individualised and diffracted expression (see Mazzoni 2005, 195). In fact, the divergent styles of Modernism have in common a decided demarcation from a vaguely defined ‘Romantic style’ as expressed, for example, in the anti-lyrisme of French symbolism (see below ¶57) or in the Anglo-American imagist movement (see below chapter ‘English Literature’).

 iv.2.44.Even if it is questionable whether there was a homogeneous European style of Romanticism, some characteristics stereotypically associated with Romantic poetry can be traced back to this period. In several literatures, an increased interest in the individuality of the poet (e.g. Wordsworth, Coleridge) can be found, the characteristics of poetic subjectivity and originality of the poetic genius. In comparison with Pre-Romantic poetry, it is often associated with a simpler lyrical style, with a strong link to popular song (see below¶56). In German poetry, the situation is only slightly more complicated insofar an influential poet such as Johann Wolfgang Goethe was a key figure in founding the tradition of lyrical subjectivity (later known as Erlebnislyrik), but saw himself as distinct from Romantic contemporaries in several respects and is categorised as Weimar Classicism (Weimarer Klassik) in German literary history (see below ¶67). Leaving aside such shifts and nuances, the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries saw Western lyric poetry break away from the normative poetic rules, and with it a new stylistic ideal of subjectivity and originality asserted itself.

 iv.2.45.In a schematising juxtaposition of Modernist and Romantic poetry, the preceding periods could appear to be sidelined. From a stylistic point of view, however, especially from the perspective of poetry as a rhetorically staged statement (see Culler 2015), this would be a misguided reduction of the lyrical tradition, since its rhetorical conception originates essentially from Pre-Romantic poetry. Poetry of the Early Modern period cannot be considered homogeneous either, since there are different epochal boundaries and stylistic characteristics despite intensive exchange relations between European literatures. Nevertheless, overarching tendencies can be identified. The neo-Aristotelian-inspired poetics of the Italian Renaissance sought to combine the authority of ancient textbooks with vernacular style poetry, especially with the exemplary poems by Petrarch (see below ¶49). A similar connection of poetic practice to the poetological treatises and exemplary authors of Antiquity also took place with a time lag in English, French, and finally also in German poetics; in these literary traditions, too, greater attention was paid to the rhetorical elements (for the most important treatises in this context, see ¶50, ¶53, ¶59). The orientation towards rhetorical concepts and the importance of imitating literary models of Antiquity, literary requirements that were already at the centre of the Renaissance, remained influential throughout the Early Modern period. All the same, more recent vernacular style models increasingly influenced lyrical production. For instance, in French Classicism in the 17th century, the reference to ancient forms remained important, but in connection with the so-called Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns (‘Querelles des Anciens et des Modernes’), a greater self-confidence towards ancient models was expressed.

 iv.2.46.In what follows, the history of lyrical style in Europe is told along the lines of the respective linguistic traditions. This is partly because it is difficult to relate the mutual influences that took place at different times. Finally, this structure provides up the possibility of adding further overviews in the future.

The Italian Renaissance

 iv.2.47.In tracing the history of style in lyric poetry in the modern Western tradition, a key milestone is to be found in the discussions of poetics in 16^th-century Italy, at a time when Italian writers were at the forefront of literary culture in Europe. It is within this context that the profound metamorphosis that lies at the origin of ‘modern poetry’ began (see Mazzoni 2005, 43). It was here that the modern category of lyric poetry, as a unitary literary genre on the same level as the two classical genres of epic and drama, was first developed, starting with the framework offered by Antonio Sebastiani Minturno (de poeta [On the Poet], 1559; dell’arte poetica [The Art of Poetry], 1564; see Huss 2020). Certain cultural features of this period had repercussions that echoed through the following centuries. For this reason, our focus will be on Italian poetic culture between the 16^th and 17^th centuries, leaving aside later developments which, although significant, were mostly elaborations on foreign trends.

 iv.2.48.One of the most important historical peculiarities of Italian literature, from its origins through to the modern age, is the country’s enduring linguistic fragmentation. The heterogeneity of Italian dialects, which was already at the centre of Dante’s linguistic reflections in his treatise de vulgari eloquentia (‘On Eloquence in the Vernacular’), has shaped a strong dichotomy between the everyday dialects, which differ in each region and city, and what, in the early modern period, came to be the language of reference for literary writing, namely 14^th-century Florentine, the language of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Petrarch’s Canzoniere, and Boccaccio’s Decameron. This situation, and these three precocious masterpieces, lie at the origin of the hyper-literariness that has been identified as one of the main characteristics of the Italian poetic tradition. Until the second half of the 20^th century, “the common literary language [was] formed [...] on a purely written, and archaising basis,” which resulted in “very little exchange between literary – and especially poetic – language and speech” (Mengaldo 2001, 102–103: “la lingua letteraria comune si forma [...] su base puramente scritta, e arcaizzante [...]. Ciò comporta uno scarsissimo scambio fra lingua letteraria – e specie poetica – e parlato”). This situation is particularly evident in the field of lyric poetry, in which an enormously successful and widely diffused corpus emerged that took Petrarch’s language and style as its main model. Moreover, since it was intertwined with the humanistic movement that spread from Veneto and Tuscany between the 14^th and 15^th centuries, it is also at the origin of the precocious theoretical reflections on language and style produced by Italian scholars.

 iv.2.49.The Italian literary scene of the mid to late 16^th century is characterised by the affirmation of Petrarchism in the field of poetic production and of Neo-Aristotelianism in the field of theoretical reflection. Although treatises exclusively dedicated to lyric poetry are few in number, the debate about the status and forms of this genre of poetry was lively and animated, taking place mainly through hybrid forms, such as commentaries on lyric canzonieri or academic lectures dedicated to the exegesis of poems (Tomasi 2012,
Petteruti Pellegrino 2013). In these writings, one senses the difficulty of reconciling a work such as Petrarch’s Canzoniere, “in which different metres and themes coexist, and in which the overall unity is ensured only by the unity of the ‘I’ who writes” (“in cui convivono metri diversi e temi diversi, e in cui l’unità complessiva è assicurata solo dall’unità dell’io che scrive”; Mazzoni 2005, 61), with the explicit declarations of the classical auctoritates, Plato and Aristotle, who describe poets as imitators of the actions of others (see Plato Republic III 393a–394c and Aristotle Poetics 3 1448a 19–24) and therefore prescribe that he should avoid speaking in the first person as much as possible (see Angelo Segni, Lezioni intorno alla poesia [Lectures on Poetry, 1573], in Weinberg 1972, III, 21–22 and Alessandro Guarini, Lezione… sopra il sonetto «Doglia che vaga donna» di Monsignor Della Casa [Lecture on Della Casa’s Sonnet ‘Doglia, che vaga donna’, 1599], in Guarini 1611, 23–24). The attempt to find a compromise between Petrarch and the ancient masters resulted in “the invention of lyric poetry as a unitary genre” (“l’invenzione della poesia lirica come genere unitario”; Mazzoni 2005, 60): authors such as Torquato Tasso, Giulio Cesare Scaligero, and Filippo Sassetti characterise lyric poetry as the imitation—or even expression—of “concepts”, that is, of the mental contents, thoughts, and sensations not of a fictional character, but of the poet himself (Mazzoni 2005, 63–64).

 iv.2.50.Drawing on ancient rhetorical treatises, which could be fully exploited thanks to new translations and commentaries (esp. Pseudo-Demetrius Phalereus, Peri Ermeneias [On Style]; Hermogenes of Tarsus, Peri ideon logou [On Types of Style]; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Peri syntheseos onomaton [On the Arrangement of Words]; Pseudo-Longinus, Peri Hypsous [On the Sublime]), the elaboration of a new idea of lyric poetry was accompanied by a special focus on the study of stylistic phenomena (Petteruti Pellegrino 2013, 143). Within this context, Torquato Tasso’s reflections are particularly significant, among other things for the enduring influence they had in the following two centuries. Tasso stands out above all for an innovative conception of style that is not limited, as was the classical model, to elocutio, but extends to inventio as well, since he considers style as a unity of concepts and words: “Quando io dico stilo, intendo non l’elocuzione semplicemente, ma quel carattere che da l’elocuzioni e da’ concetti risulta” (Tasso, Lezione sopra un sonetto di Monsignor Della Casa [about 1570], in Guasti 1875, II, 121: “When I speak of style, I mean not simply elocution, but that character that results from elocution and concepts”). In his thought, a key notion is that of neglegentia diligens (Cicero, Orator, 77–79, see Cicero 2014), which is linked to the similar concept of sprezzatura (Castiglione, Cort. I 26, see Castiglione 1998), namely the idea that a work is more admirable if the great effort that went into constructing it is not obvious, so that it appears spontaneous and improvised. In other words, the highest achievement of art is to conceal itself. Combining this Ciceronian principle with the teachings of Pseudo-Demetrius, Tasso identifies the use of the figures of correlation and repetition as a key principle for evaluating the different styles of lyric poetry (see Afribo 2002; Petteruti Pellegrino 2013). On the one hand, he places the ‘pleasant’ style, typical of poetry that deals with light, usually amorous themes, and characterised by the abundant use of “the figures of harmonious and symmetrical dislocation of words in the unity of the verse or sentence” (“le figure di dislocazione armoniosa e simmetrica delle parole nell’unità del verso o della frase”; Grosser 1992, 6) such as parallelism and antithesis. At the opposite end of the spectrum are the magnifico and grave styles, to which more elevated, political or philosophical themes belong, and which systematically reject the ostentation of overly refined harmonic balances. The poems devoted to the most important themes may contain apparent errors, such as ad sensum concordances (i.e., the inflection of words according to coherence rather than grammatical rules), anacolutha, and asymmetrical constructions, as a means of showing that the author did not expend all his energy on asphyxiating combinatorial games, since such ostentatious artifice is incompatible with “the credible expression of feelings and passions, as well as of one’s own profound convictions” (“l’espressione credible dei sentimenti e delle passioni, oltre che delle proprie convinzioni profonde”; Petteruti Pellegrino 2013, 126). The application of such doctrines to the new way of conceiving lyric poetry thus became one of the vectors of the development of what was to become the modern notion of subjectivity, and in particular of lyric subjectivity (for this, see on a more general level Romano 2019).

 iv.2.51.The strong link established by Tasso between lyrical expression and ‘concepts’ led to an important development in the poetic culture of the following decades. It was precisely one of his great admirers, Camillo Pellegrino, who, as early as 1598, composed the dialogue Del concetto poetico (On the Poetic Conceit, in Borzelli 1898, 324–359), whose protagonists include Giovan Battista Marino, the poet who would go on to become the symbol of the Baroque style in literature. Within this framework, commonly referred to as ‘conceitism,’ poetic excellence is assigned to wit (acutezza, agudeza), in the sense of an unusual image or expression that links together elements that are usually in conflict, with new combinations capable of surprising and disorienting the reader or spectator. This aesthetic, which spread at the beginning of the 17^th century, especially in Italy, Spain, and Germany, was subsequently theorised in Spain by Baltasar Gracián in his Agudeza y arte de ingenio (1642, Subtlety and the Art of Genius, see Gracián 1969) and in Italy by Emanuele Tesauro, who, in his treatise Il Cannocchiale Aristotelico (The Aristotelian Telescope, first published in 1654, but composed in the 1620s, see Tesauro 1968), pointed to metaphor as the fundamental rhetorical figure of poetic pleasure and literary knowledge, due to its ability to creatively associate distant images by condensing many different meanings into a single word (see Battistini 2000, 131–150; Vuilleumier 1999).

French Literature

 iv.2.52.Lyrisme: In French literary criticism, the style specific to poetry is usually discussed under the heading of lyrisme (‘lyricism’). Lyrisme emphasises the expressive and emotive qualities of poetic language and generally implies the presence of a poetic I as the source of enunciation. This term, which was first used by the Romantic poet Alfred de Musset in 1829 (see Maulpoix 2000, 31), emerges from a genuinely modern reflection on the peculiar nature of poetry in opposition to other literary genres. Despite its potentially anachronistic nature, this term has been used, with certain adjustments, to analyse the poetry of both the French Renaissance and the period of French classicism, which roughly spans the 17^th and 18^th centuries.

 iv.2.53.The Renaissance: In the most important poetological writings of the French Renaissance, such as Joachim Du Bellay’s Deffence, et illustration de la langue Françoyse (Defence and Nobilisation of the French Language, 1549, see Du Bellay 2007) and Jacques Peletier du Mans’s L’Art poëtique (The Art of Poetry, Peletier 1555), the discussion of poetry unfolds within the framework of ancient rhetoric, without placing any particular emphasis on the specificities of lyric style. This is because most of these writings focus exclusively on poetry, without any consideration of dramatic genres—a tradition that, by 1550, had yet to be established in France—or prose works. According to the threefold model of style inherited from Antiquity, poetry was usually associated with the stilus medius or—for certain genres, such as odes and hymns—the stilus grandiloquus. This absence of a sustained reflection on the particular nature of poetry, apart from the influence of ancient rhetoric, may also be due to the fact that these poetological writings still seek to establish a French literary language and a French literary tradition capable of rivalling not only the Ancients, but also the abundance of contemporary Italian vernacular literature. (French medieval literature was generally considered uncouth, or even barbaric, by the poets and theorists of the so-called Pléiade.) Thus, Du Bellay’s treatise, in particular, betrays a strong focus on imitation. Lyrical genres cultivated by the Ancients and new (‘Italian’) forms, such as the sonnet, are correspondingly considered templates for future poets, who embark on the task of expanding the literary expressiveness of the French language and hence to ‘ennoble’ (illustrer) it. However, in Du Bellay’s characterisation of the poet’s primary aim, we find some affinity with at least one aspect that will later be referred to by the term lyrisme: “saiches, Lecteur, que celuy sera veritablement le Poëte, que je cherche en nostre Langue, qui me fera indigner, apayser, éjouyr, douloir, aymer, hayr, admirer, etonner, bref, qui tiendra la bride de mes Affections, me tournant ça, et là à son plaisir. Voyla la vraye pierre de Touche, où il fault que tu epreuves tous Poëmes, et en toutes Langues.” (Du Bellay 2007 [1549], 170; “Know this, reader, that he will truly be the poet I am seeking in our language, who will make me feel outrage, peace, delight, pain, love, hate, admiration, astonishment, in short, [he] who will hold the bridles of my emotions, steering me this way and that at his will. This is indeed the true touchstone with which you should test all poems in all languages.”) The primary aim of poetry is thus the evocation of strong and varied emotions, even passions. Its focus is neither mimesis nor the transmission of a story (with the exception of epic poetry, of course). According to Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani (1984), the term lyrisme can therefore be applied to Renaissance poetry in three different ways: (a) to designate poetry that is sung or accompanied by music; (b) to refer to poetic topics and themes (topoi) suitable to arousing individual or collective emotions; and (c) to underscore the dominance of a lyrical speaker, i.e., an individualised subjectivity that may or may not coincide with that of the poet.

 iv.2.54.Classicism: The association of poetry with the arousal of passions using the lyrical speaker as a transmitter continues in French literature well into the 18^th century. François Fénelon in his Lettre sur l’éloquence (Letter on Eloquence) sees the specificity of (great) poetry as lying in the fact that it is “speech animated by vivid images, by great figures and by the charms of harmony” (Fénelon 1797 [1714], 257; “[l]a parole animée par les vives images, par les grandes figures, et par le charme de l’harmonie”). In a similar vein, Louis Racine, son of the great tragic poet, writes in his Réflexions sur la poésie (Reflections on Poetry) that “the poetic style is the style of the passions” (Racine 1808 [1747], 184; “le style poétique est le style des passions”). In the course of the 18^th century, we see a growing emphasis on imagery and the imagination in discussions of poetry, slowly laying the groundwork for a trend that would subsequently alter the poetic paradigm of imitation, which remained dominant throughout French classicism, replacing it with the paradigm centred around subjectivity and originality that is typical of French Romanticism. By modern standards, however, the lyrisme of French classicist poetry is hedged in by traditional lyrical forms and the stylistic expectations to which they give rise. This is why, to set it apart from later, especially Romantic uses of the term, it is considered a lyrisme impersonnel (see Génetiot 2015, 588). The definition of style lyrique that can be found in the entry “Style” in the Encyclopédie offers a summary of classicist considerations about poetic style:

Le style lyrique s’éleve comme un trait de flamme, & tient par sa chaleur au sentiment & au goût : il est tout rempli de l’enthousiasme que lui inspire l’objet présent à sa lyre ; ses images sont sublimes, & ses sentimens pleins de feu. De-là les termes riches, forts, hardis, les sons harmonieux, les figures brillantes, hyperboliques, & les tours singuliers de ce genre de poésie. (Diderot and D’Alembert 1751–1772, vol. 15, 552; “Lyrical style rises like a flame and is through its warmth related to feeling and taste: it is completely filled with the enthusiasm awakened by the object present to its lyre; its images are sublime and its feelings filled with fire. Hence the rich, strong, and bold terms, the harmonious sounds, the brilliant, hyperbolic figures, and the singular expressions of this poetic genre.”)

 iv.2.55.At the same time, this quote demonstrates that early modern definitions of poetic style sometimes tend to exemplify, rather than analyse. The relative poverty of classicist reflections on the specificities of poetic style may ultimately be due to the fact that, as Gérard Genette suggests, the purely formal categories of verse, metre, and rhyme were usually deemed sufficient to define a given text as “poetry” (see Genette 1971, 423–424), while the omnipresent preoccupation with style in this “age of eloquence” (see Fumaroli 1980) affected nearly all varieties of written or spoken discourse, whether literary or not (see Molinié 1996).

 iv.2.56.Romanticism: Romantic poetry in France ushered in the age of lyrisme. While classical forms and the exemplary function of the Ancients gradually lost relevance, the focus fell on novelty and the exploration of yet uncharted poetic space. Poets like Victor Hugo revived Renaissance concepts, such as the poeta vates (Producer of Lyric) to legitimise their use of unfettered poetic imagination. The force of individual poetic vision increasingly superseded the mastery of traditional poetic forms. Despite the vast production of poetry in French Romanticism, it was not the object of a coherent contemporary theory. There was no manifesto laying down the tenets of what is to be considered poetry and what not, let alone a coherent reflection on poetic style. Rather, towards the end of the Romantic era, the prose poem emerged and attempted to expand lyrisme beyond the formal restriction of verse and metre, as in Aloysius de Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit (Gaspard of the Night, 1842) that also inspire Charles Baudelaire’s Le spleen de Paris (1869).

 iv.2.57.Symbolism: After Romanticism and in the wake of Baudelaire, French poetry found itself in a crisis, as Mallarmé put it: a “crise de vers”. In opposition to the effusive lyricism of the Romantics, there emerged a tendency towards “the elocutionary disappearance of the poet” (Mallarmé 2003, 211; “la disparition élocutoire du poëte”) and ultimately towards a type of poetry that can no longer be interpreted in terms of subjectivity. Due to its opposition to Romantic lyrisme, this trend is sometimes referred to as anti-lyrisme. This éclatement (‘bursting’ or ‘explosion’) of lyrical subjectivity was accompanied by a growing rejection of traditional metrical forms, while ‘open’ forms, such as the vers libre (free verse à rhythm, metre, line), and prose poems attracted growing interest. As a result, in the aftermath of Romanticism, symbolist poetry became increasingly self-conscious and self-reflexive and – in a trend that would continue throughout the 20^th century – betrayed a strong tendency to bring together poetic creation and critical reflection on it in the same text.

 iv.2.58.While 20^th-century French poetry comprises a plethora of different poetic currents that resist the imposition of any unifying model, lyrisme and anti-lyrisme mark the opposing extremes of a spectrum that enables at least a rough characterisation of a given text. For instance, some surrealist poetry maybe considered as an experiment in a new, unbound lyrisme, while other avant-garde texts continue the movement of anti-lyrisme formulated most forcefully by Mallarmé.

English Literature

 iv.2.59.In the early modern period, which begins with the end of the Middle Ages and extends until the late eighteenth century, the first notable poetological works were Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy (1595, Sidney), John Dryden’s Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), and Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism (1711). These works drew strongly on Aristotle and Plato in their discussions of mimesis and truthfulness in writing, with the poet emerging as a “maker” (Sidney 2002, 84). However, this does not entail an appraisal of originality, poetry being in itself an “art of imitation” (Sidney 2002, 86). As an apologetic text, Sidney’s Defense aims to counter anti-fictional tendencies in English Puritanism. In this context, style does not equal individuality, but rather the writer’s self-insertion into a distinct tradition, such as classical rhetoric.

 iv.2.60.Alexander Pope was a key figure in 18^th-century English literature, the so-called Augustan Age or Age of Reason, which prided itself on its orderliness and orientation towards the symmetrical and harmonious, as well as its embrace of neo-classical standards in literature and beyond. This was the time when poetic diction emerged as a defining principle in the history of English poetry. In the Augustan period, poetic diction is closely entwined with the notion of decorum, which refers, following Owen Barfield’s classic definition, to situations “[w]hen words are selected and arranged in such a way that their meaning arouses, or is obviously intended to arouse, aesthetic imagination” (Barfield 1952, 41). According to Trimpi and Blumberg (2012, 63), poetic diction is “a fluid corrective process that must achieve and maintain, instant by instant, the delicate balance among the formal, cognitive, and judicative intentions of literary discourse.” Neo-classicist poets such as Pope, Jonathan Swift, and John Dryden were thus expected to adapt their style and register to the mode of the chosen genre (see Abrams and Harpham 2015, 298). In the 17^th and 18^th centuries, this very often resulted in an elevated style, with numerous archaisms, epithets, personifications, and periphrases. In this period, aesthetic production was thus generally tied to a canon of rules. To write accomplished poetry meant to implement these rules and to excel at imitation. At the turn of the 19^th century at the latest, such normative ideals of literary production were superseded by a loosening of poetic conventions in the literary period commonly known as Romanticism. Romanticism saw the rise of the poetic subject, along with calls for originality and a celebration of poetic genius, as well as a return to the language of the common man in poetry. An important point of reference is William Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1798), a collection of poems that he co-authored with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Here, Wordsworth aimed to revive “a selection of language really used by men,” focusing on “[l]ow and rustic life” (Wordsworth 1992, 59f.). In addition to this ideal of a more democratic language, freed from the artificial constraints of decorum, there emerged a demand for immediate poetic expression, “[f]or all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (Wordsworth 1992, 62).

 iv.2.61.In the course of English literary history, discussions surrounding the use of a distinct poetic language, or diction, resurface at various moments. Notably, it was in the modernist period, in the early 20^th century, that programmatic calls were once again made for a different kind of poetic style. The English philosopher and critic T. E. Hulme (1987, 131), in his essay “Romanticism and Classicism” (1924), predicted that “a period of dry, hard, classical verse” was coming, in line with the modernist disavowal of what was perceived as Victorian bombast and verbiage. As Virginia Woolf put it in her novel Orlando (1928), the Victorian period saw “[l]ove, birth, and death were all swaddled in a variety of fine phrases” (Woolf 2019, 158). In reaction to this perceived verbal and emotional excess, calls for a more economic usage of words were made: “To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation” one of the three principles formulated for the modernist era by the modernist poet Ezra Pound, along with the American poets H.D. (aka Hilda Doolittle) and Richard Aldington, in addition to the “direct treatment” of the “thing” and the preference for a musical rhythm rather than that of a metronome (in “A Retrospect,” 1918; Pound 2009a). “Imagist poetry,” which was highly condensed and of an intense visual nature, epitomises these modernist principles. Pound defined an image “as that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” (“A Few Don’ts,” 1913; Pound 2009b).

German Literature

 iv.2.62.When it comes to the question of style in the field of German-language lyric poetry, we should take into account the fact that the term Lyrik (similar to French lyrisme) has only been in use since around 1800 as the label for an overarching genre (--> lyric as genre or mode) to be set alongside epic and drama. At the same time, the adjective lyrisch was thought to refer not only to the genre of Lyrik, but also to dramatic and epic works, indicating a ‘lyrical’ quality (see Burdorf 2000).

 iv.2.63.While vernacular poetics based on Aristotelian models in Italian or French emerged in the 16^th century, traditions of medieval poetry (mittelhochdeutsche Lyrik, ‘Middle High German Lyric’) persisted in German, for instance, in Meistersang with very strict formal and stylistic specifications in large cities in southern Germany, as well as in religious-devotional poetry such as the church hymn (Kirchenlied; e.g. Martin Luther’s “Ein feste burg ist vnser Gott,” “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”). Whenever poets followed models of classical poetry (e.g., Conrad Celtis or Celtes), they wrote their poems mostly in Latin (see Penzenstadler 2016; Kemper 1987).

 iv.2.64.In the Early Modern period (Frühe Neuzeit), Martin Opitz’s Buch von der deutschen Poeterey (Book on German Poetry, 1624) an influential integration of classical rhetoric and poetics into vernacular poetry. Even if Opitz mentions a concept (albeit limited) of lyric poetry (“Lyrica”, Opitz 1977, 30) as a synonym for singable poems “Ode” (from the Greek for ‘song’) was the most frequently used term at that time (see Krummacher 2013, 77–123).

 iv.2.65.In the 17^th and early 18^th centuries, which is usually referred to in German as the Baroque period (Barock or Barockzeit), Opitz remains a point of reference. Baroque, a term borrowed from the history of the arts, may also be understood as a stylistic concept similar to Mannerism (Manierismus). The poetical ideal is to demonstrate artful mastery of language. The poems of the Baroque period often stand in relation to certain events, like funerals and weddings, and are therefore considered Gelegenheitsgedichte (‘occasional poetry’, see Segebrecht 1997).

 iv.2.66.Only in the second half of the 18^th century did the stylistic ideal turn to the expression of enthusiastic poetic imagination in a high style (see Krummacher 2013, 99–101). The heterometric ode stanza, closely modelled on classical poetry (-->rhythm, metre, line), came to be the most prominent stylistic feature, with Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock’s odes as stylistic point of reference. An open ode form is characteristic of the poetry of Friedrich Schiller, which Friedrich Hölderlin drew on in writing his own odes and developing his hymns. His poems contain harte Fügungen (‘hard joining’) and Wechsel der Töne (‘alternation of tones’), which he also made the object of theoretical reflection (see Ryan 1960). Important aspects of his free-rhythm poems include enjambments (Rhythm, Metre, Line) and a syntax characterised by inversions, ellipses, and insertions.

 iv.2.67.From the middle of the 18^th century onwards, German poetics emphasised that the ode was a sincere expression of the author’s sentiments. However, towards the end of the turn of the century (these periods are usually referred to as Weimarer Klassik and Romantik) the ideal of self-expression had repercussions for lyric style, and led to an increasing preference for poems with sentimental features in songlike forms (Lied, see below), which seemed to express immediacy and intimacy in a simple style. This new type of poetry is frequently described as Erlebnislyrik (experiential lyric poetry) or Lied (song-poetry). The term Erlebnislyrik came to prominence at the beginning of the 20^th century, denoting a lyric genre that expresses an author’s individual authentic experience of an event (Erlebnis, see Dilthey 2005 [1910]), in a seemingly authentic and ‘non-artifical’ style. Goethe, in particular, with his explanations of poetry in his autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth) promoted an understanding of his poetry as a subjective expression that could be decoded with respect to a specific moment where the poem would have been conceived (for a critical discussion, see Wünsch 1975). In contrast to occasional poetry, Erlebnislyrik is understood to be free of purpose, coinciding in this respect with the notion of autonomous literature.

 iv.2.68.The first decades of the 19^th century saw the establishment of the long-prevailing dialectical scheme according to which epic was objective, lyric poetry subjective, and drama objective-subjective. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik (Lectures on Aesthetics; published posthumously in 1835) considered lyric to be the subjective genre of poetry, calling it a poetic outpouring of the soul (“Erguss des Gemüts,” Hegel 1999, 425), which finds its simplest expression and satisfaction in senseless singing for the sake of singing (Hegel 1999, 429). Lyric poetry is, in this respect, an autonomous form of expression that, according to Hegel, still strives to express something universal. In his Ästhetik oder Wissenschaft des Schönen (Aesthetics or Study of the Beautiful, 1857), Friedrich Theodor Vischer identified songlikeness (“Liedartige”) as the “true lyric centre” (“wahre lyrische Mitte”) in which the “subject expresses itself and its mood freely and simply” (see Vischer 1857, 1351, §891). The post-Romantic poets who wrote songlike poetry are nowadays mostly considered epigonic (see Martus et al. 2005, 14), unless their poems develop an ironic suspension of what is said lyrically (e.g., Heinrich Heine)—and leaving aside some notable tendencies to write in the ‘classicist’ style (e.g., August von Platen, Friedrich Rückert).

 iv.2.69.At the turn of the 20^th century, new stylistic impulses were introduced into German poetry, especially by French Symbolism, but also by a Sprachkrise (language crisis), to which authors like Friedrich Nietzsche, Stefan George, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Rainer Maria Rilke reacted (see Kiesel 2004). With their emphatically aesthetic approach, they stood for the autonomy of the art of language (l’art pour l’art). This was accompanied by a re-evaluation of the canon of German poetry, in particular of Friedrich Hölderlin, leading to the development of what is called in German Lyrik der Moderne (‘Modern Poetry’). These innovations particularly concerned metrical aspects, i.e., the inclusion of free-verse poetry (Rhyme, rhythm, metre). But more general questions of lyrical expression, such as the subject paradigm, were also reconsidered. This tradition of poetry was viewed as self-centred to the point of isolation, because of its magical language and obscure style (see Friedrich 1956, which is dated, but still influential). A notable movement that is particularly prominent in lyric poetry is Expressionism (“Expressionismus”, for instance Else Lasker Schüler, Gottfried Benn). Its lyric is often characterised by surreal, sometimes gaudy metaphors and an unconventional, terse syntax. An extreme example can be found in the works of Dadaism (Dadaismus, Dada), a movement that stands for an absolute and, at the same time, objectified individualism in connection with a completely objectified world.

 iv.2.70.Not only did the coming to power of the National Socialist regime in Germany and Austria force many poets into exile (e.g. Bertolt Brecht), but its dictatorial cultural policy, with strict regulations on the form, content, and style of literature, brought an abrupt end to the various modernist movements in Germany and Austria. After the Second World War, new approaches to lyric poetry were sought, including with regard to style. Theodor W. Adorno pointedly claimed that writing poems after Auschwitz was barbaric ( [1951], 65: “nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch”). Adorno later repeatedly commented on his controversial statement, which he did not retract, but rather presented as a challenge that poetry must be able to withstand the verdict of history (see Adorno 1981, 423). Adorno was critical of political messages in poetry, on the grounds that only an autonomous work of art could achieve a genuinely upsetting effect. At the same time, poets—in defiance of Adorno’s verdict—sought new means of lyric expression in a language tainted by political lies and atrocities. A hermetic style in poetry emerged, the main representative of which is Paul Celan. During the second half of the 20^th century, various new movement emerged, leading to a broad stylistic spectrum of lyric poetry (see Korte 2004a; 2004b). For instance, the concrete poetry of the 1960s distanced itself from hermetic tendencies, while also drawing on the positions of the Dada movement. Rolf Dieter Brinkmann or Thomas Kling followed a middle way, in which sound plays an important role in poetry. Significant stylistic impulses were also given by Hans Magnus Enzensberger with his anthologies of poems (e.g., Museum der modernen Poesie, 1960; Andreas Thalmayr [i.e., Enzensberger]: Das Wasserzeichen der Poesie, 1985), which brought lyrical works of international modernism into discussion.

State of the Art

 iv.2.71.Textbooks on the analysis of lyric poems usually include chapters on metric form (Rhythm, Metre, Line) as well as stylistics. However, despite the existence of a shared foundation in the Renaissance reception of classic poetics, as well as a shared catalogue of stylistic devices in Europe, most textbooks limit themselves to the perspective of a particular national language. This fragmentation along the lines of national literatures also applies to stylistics, which, for instance, prepares students for the analysis of English- or French-language poems without providing a broader international perspective.

 iv.2.72.Important stimuli for new international thinking on poetry came from Russian Formalism and East European and global structuralism. Formalism emerged in the 1910s as a school of thought associated with young people facing a situation of great upheaval in every sphere of Russian civilisation, culture, and the arts (three revolutions took place—in 1905, in February 1917, and in October 1917—followed by World War I, the Civil War [1917–1922], and the Polish–Soviet War [1919–1922]). Its members were adherents of the most recent trends in poetry (Vladimir Mayakovsky, Velimir Khlebnikov, Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelshtam, and Marina Tzvetayeva) and focused particularly on the structure and form of language. Viktor Shklovsky, himself a writer, pleads in his essay “The Reawakening of the Word” (1914; Stempel and Paulmann 1972, 2–17), for a poetry that makes the word live again. In his 1917 essay “Art as Technique,” he argues that “[a]rt exists [so] that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony” (Shklovsky 1988, 22; see Lachmann 1970). Everyday language can be transformed into poetic language by means of defamiliarisation, by which Shklovsky meant “seeing things out of their normal context” (Shklovsky 1988, 24). Defamiliarisation – otherwise known as étrangisation (French), straniamento (Italian), Verfremdung (German) – de-automatisation, norm-breaking, uncovering of the procedure, deforming, reforming, and transforming (later: re-evaluating) became standard key concepts in thinking about poetry. Roman Jakobson, a friend of Mayakovsky and himself a juvenile author of futurist poetry, laid out his subsequently influential ideas on the poetry of grammar and the grammar of poetry in his early essay “The Newest Russian Poetry” (1919; 1921; see Stempel and Paulmann 1972, 18–135, see also Jakobson 1981). In contrast to Filippo Tomaso Marinetti, whose ideas on futurism he considered “impressionistic,” he sees the Russian futurists (especially Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov) as founders of a poetry rooted in “the self-empowered, self-worth word” (Stempel and Paulmann 1972, 28). The themes of such poetical language are derivative, and an “uncovering of the poetical procedure” is more important than logical motivation. Poetical procedures, in the sense of bare repetitions of the same pattern or creating paradoxical equivalents between contrasting sets of elements, are meant to create forms that are difficult and strange to the reader. They affect (“deform”) the word sounds (“sound repeaters,” metrical structures), the stylistic values of the word, the word-building, the flexion, the word as a part of speech or of a verse line, the syntax of individual sentences and groups of sentences, the domains of styles and meanings, and what he will later call “verbal communication functions” (Jakobson 1960, 357). The early Jakobson’s long list of procedures refreshes the old rhetorical term vitium (‘vice/error’), making it into a virtue and a tool. Of great interest is his endeavour to show the efforts of sentimentalist, classical, and Romantic poets (and so on) to create difficult and disturbing forms and phrasings for their readers that subsequently came to be resented as comfortably harmonious. Together with Yury Tynianov and Jan Mukařovský, Jakobson was a founder of East European (Russian and Czechoslovakian) and later global structuralism. He also went on to become one of the most influential poetry theorists in North America. In his “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics” Jakobson (1960, 377) argues that “poeticalness is not a supplementation of discourse with rhetorical adornment but a total re-evaluation of the discourse and of all its components whatsoever.”

 iv.2.73.In Britain and North America, questions of poetic language and form have informed the theories and practices of the New Criticism and the New Formalism. The New Criticism was a movement that lasted from the 1920s until the 1960s, with its notable works including not only those by I. A. Richards (1924; 1929), but also those by the British critics W. Empson (1947 [1930]) and F. R. Leavis (1936). Cleanth Brooks’ The Well Wrought Urn (1960 [1947]) is considered a classic in this tradition. Critics working with the new paradigm looked for text-immanent meaning when discussing literary works, discarding biographical and contextual information so far as possible. The New Criticism pursued formalist approaches to poetry, paying special attention to linguistic features, the interactions between words, and figures of speech. Hence, the practice of close readings established by the New Critics valued questions of style highly. A more recent contribution to theoretical discussions of (a new) formalism was Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015), where she argued for the significance of form in literature, but also in social and political discourse.

 iv.2.74.In Britain, a linguistically oriented approach to stylistics became established in the second half of the 20^th century, which sought to formalise a stylistic terminology and methodology, including with respect to the analysis of lyric poetry (e.g., Leech 1991 [1969]). Insofar as such approaches remain committed to close reading, they cannot overcome the tight link between descriptive and interpretative acts (e.g., Stanley Fish’s provocative questions “What is Stylistics and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things About it?”; see Fish 1980, 68–96). Despite an extensive catalogue of descriptive terms, stylistic analysis is not an exact science—even in these more rigorous structuralist or linguistic versions.

 iv.2.75.While close reading has survived as a popular analytical method for scholars, teachers and students alike, theoretical approaches to literary studies changed in the second half of the 20^th century, with the development of a greater interest in contextual and sociological readings (e.g., cultural studies, post-colonial theories, gender theories; see Spivak 2003) and the role of the reader (reader-response theories, cognitive poetics, see Tsur 1992; Stockwell 2020). Interest in purely formal matters has waned (with notable exceptions, such as New Formalism), and with it the prominence of style as one particularly important aspect of poetry. That said, the close reading of literary texts has become an elementary part of the study and analysis of literary texts, and remains a subject of critical discussion (see Lentricchia and Dubois 2003; James 2020).

 iv.2.76.In German-language research, an important school that combined linguistic analyses with a specific interest in authorial style, as established by Leo Spitzer, who was forced into exile, seems to have been left without a successor. Spitzer’s (1928) method, which was based on the observation of linguistic features such as adjectives or reflexive verbs, considered the analysis of ‘style individuality’ to represent a way of understanding the individuality of a poet’s soul. More influential was werk-immanente (work-immanent) Interpretation (e.g. Wolfgang Kayser 1992 [1948] and Emil Staiger 1963 [1946]), which is situated in a similar vein to New Criticism. Werkimmanenz displayed a noticeable appreciation of stylistic analysis, coupled with a disdain for formal rhetoric (see Burdorf 2009, 2093). For instance, style plays an important role in the theoretical considerations of Staiger, which is, however, at the same time an example of how idealistic theories of Lyrik persisted in German research, as he considered ‘lyrical style’ (“lyrischer Stil”) a “music of words and their meaning,” which does not aim at actual understanding, coherent grammar, or logic, but is only structured by recurring patterns of sound (see Staiger 1963, 51f.).

 iv.2.77.In 20^th-century French academia, discussions about the specifics of poetic style were invigorated by the rise of structuralism, the emergence of the Nouvelle critique and—to a certain extent—the discipline of la stylistique (stylistics). Various proposals for a scientific criterion to determine the lyrical nature of a given text were made, e.g., by pointing to the metaphorical character of poetry vs. the metonymic nature of prose or by emphasising the ‘connotative’ nature of poems vs. ‘denotative’ prose (see Cohen 1966). However, all of these attempts to locate the specificity of poetry within the semantics of the text faced two major problems: a) a lack of distinctiveness, as all of the elements mentioned also appear in dramatic and narrative texts, and (sometimes) b) a reductionist view of poetry, whose specific nature was often associated with the emotive function of language, thereby renewing—in the guise of modern linguistic terminology—the old idea of poetry as ‘language of the emotions’ (see Cohen 1966). In view of all these failed (or flawed) attempts to define poetry in terms of an écart (deviation) from other types of language, Gérard Genette, inspired by Roland Barthes (Barthes 1967) and Roman Jakobson (1960), suggested understanding poetry through its ambition to (re-)motivate linguistic signs, a process Genette termed ‘cratylism’ or ‘secondary cratylism,’ in reference to Plato’s Cratylus (see Genette 1971, 440–441; also Genette 1976). This project of creating a field of meaning where the relation between signifier and signified is necessary and not arbitrary cannot, however, be confined to poetry alone (as Genette himself admitted), although it may be particularly prominent there.

 iv.2.78.Contemporary discussions of poetry usually embrace the concept of lyrisme (or its counterpart anti-lyrisme), as it promises a more encompassing view of poetry, privileging inspiration, being-in-the-world, and the subject’s struggle with language over the more formal elements of a particular text. At the same time, the concept of lyrisme does not provide a new definition of poetry, since its most seasoned champion, J.-M. Maulpoix, admits that lyrisme may also describe the emergence of texts belonging to different literary genres (see Maulpoix 2000, 22f.). In a similar vein, Molinié underscores the ‘density’ of linguistic elements of lyrisme (or anti-lyrisme) in lyrical poetry, which are not in themselves exclusive to poetry: “it is their densification that highlights the lyrical passage, it is their massive and dominating presence that defines the lyrical text” (Molinié 2008, 38, our emphasis; “c’est leur densification qui signale le passage lyrique, et c’est leur presence massive et dominante qui définit le texte lyrique”). While the discipline of stylistique seems to have passed its prime as a field of academic research, its close attention to the rhetorical structure of poetry, comparable to the practice of close reading established by New Criticism, is still part and parcel of the way literature and poetry are taught at French lycées, as well as in the first years of university.

 iv.2.79.For the most part, Italian stylistics in the 20^th century developed suggestions that came from elsewhere in Europe and the United States. We can recall, however, that Giacomo Devoto’s studies (1950, 1962, 1975) reveal his early interest in the reciprocal influence between literary language and the varieties of the language of use, linked to the cultural polycentrism of the Italian peninsula and the enduring vitality of the dialects (see Segre 1999, 318–319). The most original contribution to critical practice and the reflection on style probably came from the critic and philologist Gianfranco Contini (1912–1990), the initiator of the critica delle varianti (‘variants criticism’) or critica delle correzioni (‘corrections criticism’). Against the psychologism then dominant in Italy, he placed linguistic and stylistic data at the centre of his criticism, as he explained in an essay on Michelangelo in 1937: “Lo stile mi sembra essere, senz’altro, il modo che un autore ha di conoscere le cose. Ogni problema poetico è un problema di conoscenza. Ogni posizione stilistica, o addirittura direi grammaticale, è una posizione gnoseologica” (Contini 1974, 243: “Style seems to me to be, without a doubt, the author’s way of knowing things. Every poetic problem is a problem of knowledge. Every stylistic, or even I would say grammatical, position is a gnoseological position”). In three seminal articles on Ariosto, Petrarch, and Leopardi, published in the 1930s and 40s, Contini (1970; 2023, 133–145 and 195–239) shows the critical potential of a systematic study of the authors’ corrections on the autograph drafts of their works for the identification of their deep stylistic tendencies. The influence of Spitzer’s stylistics is intertwined with the study of Saussure’s linguistics, which leads Contini to conceive of the text as a system, in which the modification of one part has repercussions for the whole. For this reason, he approaches corrections as a whole and in their reciprocal interconnections, in order to arrive at a description of the author’s poetics (Italia and Raboni 2010, 22–26). He also emphasises that such a study has a theoretical value, as it gives substance to an idea of poetry—in the wake of Mallarmé and Valery—as “a perpetually mobile and unfinishable work, of which the historical poem represents a possible section, strictly speaking gratuitous, not necessarily the last” (Contini 2023, 198: “un lavoro perennemente mobile e non finibile, di cui il poema storico rappresenta una sezione possibile, a rigore gratuita, non necessariamente l’ultima”; see also Contini 2023, 60–61).

 iv.2.80.In scholarly and university practice, but also in critical activity, stylistic readings remained central in Italy even in the second half of the 20^th century and continue to do so in the present day. They have often produced excellent results: at a minimum, the cases of Luigi Blasucci (1924–2021) and Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo (b. 1936) should be mentioned. On a theoretical level, by contrast, the most innovative works have been rather located at the intersection of stylistics, linguistics, and metrics (see, at a minimum, Beccaria 1975 and Di Girolamo 1976; for an overview and a brief introduction to the most widespread methods and lines of interpretation in Italian stylistics, see Segre 1999, 307–330; Mengaldo 2001 and 2018; Garavelli 2010; Motta 2020).