When Barbara Hardy begins her book The Advantage of Lyric with the claim that ‘lyric poetry isolates feeling in small compass and so renders it at its most intense’ (1977, p. 2), she offers a definition of the lyric genre with which many contemporary readers would feel comfortable, and one which can be paralleled in many places. This definition suggests that lyric is necessarily brief, a record of a momentary experience distilled and compressed to reveal feeling and emotion. But there are other frequently encountered formulations. Northrop Frye, for example, takes up Mill’s definition of lyric as an utterance that is ‘overheard’, and defines it by its ‘radical of presentation’, where ‘the poet, so to speak, turns his back on his listeners, though he may speak for them, and though they may repeat some of his words after him’ (1957, p. 250). For Susanne Langer, however, lyric is defined as ‘the literary form that depends most directly on pure verbal resources-the sound and evocative power of words, metre, alliteration, rhyme, and other rhythmic devices, associated images, repetitions, archaisms, and grammatical twists. It is the most obviously linguistic creation, and therefore the readiest instance of poesis’ (1953, p. 159). Andrew Welsh takes a similar line when he observes that lyric is ‘finally less a particular genre of poetry than a distinctive way of organizing language’ in which ‘there are basic conflicts between the traditional demands of a long poem and the very different organization of a lyric-centred language’ (1978, p. 21). Jonathan Culler, from a different critical perspective, concentrates on the rhetorical figure of apostrophe (direct address, as in ‘O Rose, thou art sick’). He suggests that we should ‘distinguish two forces in poetry, the narrative and apostrophic’, and ‘that the lyric is characteristically the triumph of the apostrophic’ (1981, p. 149).