Poetry is not just a commentary on culture or a reflection of it, but a shaping participant within it. The history of genre, particularly, is the story of the changing ways in which we discuss, describe and think. I suggest that poetry of the period under discussion might be read with greater alertness to its formal negotiation with some of the key philosophical questions of modernity even while, and perhaps particularly when, its content may appear conventional and nostalgic. After all, lyric poetry responded to some of the key conceptual shifts of the nineteenth century because it had to: some of its core generic conventions were deeply challenged by changing ways of thinking and being.

Of course, the questioning of what were seen as Romantic formulations of lyric within a rapidly changing cultural context was apparent before the period I study, but what can broadly be termed ‘aestheticist’ poetry had the potential for different kinds of responses. This is a period both late Victorian and early modernist, but also one that had distinctive modes not recognised through a co-option to either. What we see in aestheticist poetry are possibilities that are different from those that emerge out of, for example, the turn towards dramatic and hybrid generic forms around the middle of the century; possibilities distinct also from the high modernist challenges to lyric poetry, and the turn to free verse. However much the theorists of modernity (Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty and Adorno) have been crucial to my analysis, what I have identified is not high modernism avant la lettre but a largely different array of responses to similar concerns.

At the beginning of this study I characterised aestheticist lyric poetry in terms of the revival of compressed, fixed verse forms, and two key impetuses: totalisation and reduction. At the heart of the crisis, and remaking, of lyric in the final decades of the nineteenth century is printed poetry's sense of having lost an intrinsic generic connection with musical and aural forms through its ‘totalisation’ in print culture. The extent to which ‘lyric’ poetry has not been defined in this study through an appeal to music and aurality reflects the expansion of the remit of the genre over the nineteenth century that had taken it away from a core Romantic association with song that David Duff has described.