The starting-point for living according to the tenets of the spirit was the individual more than society as a whole. For the age-long view that individuality was determined by social values and that warrior aristocracy was the determining group the church substituted an individual ultimately answerable to Christ the Judge. A new sense of the make-up of the person began to assert itself and demand alterations in poetic expression.

The changing character of the emotions expressed in poetry reflects this development. Progressively feelings became more the instrument of every human being's concern for the unending fate of his or her soul at the will of an absolute God and less a by-product of a hero's assertion of vigour and courage in the face of death in the prime of life, or of an old man's loss of his youthful powers, or of a person's sense of active oneness with his or her surroundings, or of a woman's loss of or separation from loved ones through social forces. Feelings which belong by right to every individual as a soul-bearer became his or her means of identifying with the common instinct for everlasting self-preservation. They formed the substance of personal relationships with God (or the devil), and ‘natural’ speech gave them outward expression, throughout the drama of human life on earth, past, present and future.

Emotion thus became the common currency for dramatic characterization of protagonists on the stage of world history.