The scholar of this work has attempted to frame a comprehensive view of medieval secular lyrics, an attempt which includes discussion of songs of satire and protest and the art lyric.

Secular Lyric interrogates the distinctively individual ways that Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson transformed classical, romantic, and early modern forms of lyric expression to address the developing conditions of Western modernity, especially the heterogeneity of believers and beliefs in an increasingly secular society. Analyzing historically and formally how these poets inscribed the pressures of the modern crowd in the text of their poems, John Michael shows how the masses appear in these poets’ work as potential readers to be courted and resisted, often at the same time. Unlike their more conventional contemporaries, Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson resist advising, sermonizing or consoling their audiences. They resist most familiar senses of meaning as well. For them, the processes of signification in print rather than the communication of truths become central to poetry, which in turn becomes a characteristic of modern verse in the Western world. Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson, in idiosyncratic but related ways, each disrupt conventional expectations while foregrounding language’s material density, thereby revealing both the potential and the limitations of art in the modern age.

The scholar of this work has attempted to frame a comprehensive view of medieval secular lyrics, an attempt which includes discussion of songs of satire and protest and the art lyric.

In Secular Lyrics, Michael interrogates the distinctively individual ways that Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson adapt ancient and renaissance conventions of lyric expression to the developing conditions of their modern context, and especially to the heterogeneity of beliefs and believers in a secular society and to the altered or emergent role that literature assumes in a secular age. In close readings of Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson, Michael analyzes how each of these poets registers the pressures and possibilities of thesechanges in the contexts and audiences for poetry within the transformative tropes and rhetorical textures of their poems. Especially Michael shows how each of these poets, in idiosyncratic but related ways, registers the pressures of the modern crowd--which Benjamin rightly identified as nineteenth-century poetry's essential topic--within their poems, where the mass appears as potential readers, as resistant skeptics, as a heterogeneous crowd of contending beliefs and contentious believers. (Here Michael engages Charles Taylor's redefinitions of secularity in his epochal A Secular Age and recent debates about the secularity or post-secularity of literature and criticism in our present moment.) These nineteenth-century poets (unlike their more conventional contemporaries) cannot imagine credibly advising, authoritatively sermonizing, or effectively consoling the mass, heterogeneous audience they confront. For them, the processes of signification rather than the communication of truths become central to their poetry, which in turn becomes an important origin of the modern poetry that in Europe and the United States follows. Each invokes the normative practices that have long characterized Western poetry only to disrupt the audience's conventional expectations and enliven the reader's sense of language's material density and the limits and potentials of modern life. What Kristeva, years ago, identified as a revolution in poetic language begins not with Mallarmé but with Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson, in their attempts to create a space for literature in the modern, secular era they sensed stirring the atmosphere around them.

This book illuminates the pervasive interplay of 'sacred' and 'secular' phenomena in the literature, history, politics, and religion of the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods. The essays gathered here constitute a new way of applying a classic dichotomy to major cultural phenomena of the pre-modern era.

Originally published in 1972, Themes and Images in the Medieval English Religious Lyric discusses themes and images in religious lyric poetry in Medieval English poetry. The book looks at the affect that tradition and convention had on the religious poetry of the medieval period. It examines the background of the lyrics, including the Latin tradition which was inherited by medieval vernacular and shows how religious lyric poetry presents, through a rich variety of images, the significant incidents in the scheme of Christ’s redemption, such as the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Passion and the Resurrection. It also considers the lyrics which were designed to assist humanity in the task of living in a Christian life, as well as those which prepared them for death.