ABSTRACT
Modern lyric poetry can plausibly be made to begin with the Troubadours. Sicilian lyric is the major link between Troubadour tradition and Dante. Octavio Paz brings out self-reflectiveness, its persistent thematization of itself as poetry, as the defining characteristic of modern poetry, from its inception with the Romantics. Paz considers the self-reflexivity to be characteristic of the modern age presumably because the individual subject becomes the new fulcrum for a comprehensive determination of the real in modern times. Hence the special role of mirrors in Troubadour poetry and in lyric generally. Even among moderns, for example, Proust and T. S. Eliot, interior worlds are discovered with a sense of their opening upon a transcendent order of things. Jean Wahl forges the terms for bridging between ancient Christian (specifically Pauline and Patristic) and Heideggerian transcendence, which is supposedly without theology, in ways that indelibly marked the thinking of Levinas and Derrida among others.
