Secular Lyric: The Modernization of the Poem in Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson

Secular Lyrics interrogates the distinctivelyindividual ways that Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson adapt ancient and renaissanceconventions of lyric expression to the developing conditions of their moderncontext, and especially to the heterogeneity of beliefs and believers in asecular society and to the altered role that literature assumes in a secularage.