ABSTRACT
In its most typically modern forms, which generally take their distance from traditional choral and impersonal models, lyric turns confessional and becomes a song of the self. The construction of an order without contingency, an order which receives only from and into itself, is envisaged by Dante as an imitation of divine order. But it can also come perilously close to supplanting such order. Yet the subversiveness of lyric, its troping of the proper values of words and thereby of everything else, as well as its self-enclosure, while apparently irresponsible and insubordinate to any outside norm or objective order, is not quite as pat as this story makes it out to be. Lyric can also be discovered as a way of opening to a higher order beyond the self, a way of creating harmony from below as a means of attunement to a universal harmony grasped in faith.
