In the history of English literature, the emergence of the Middle English lyric is an event of considerable significance on several counts. One is a matter of poetic form. Readers of short poems in English from Chaucer to the present day might be tempted to think that such poems had always been written in stanza form. This, of course, is not the case. Only in early Middle English, less than two centuries before Chaucer, did poems structured in sequences of verse units each having the same number of lines, matching in length and marked out by a scheme of rhymes, make their appearance in English literature. Prior to the twelfth century, poems in English, short or long, had been written in one and the same verse form, the Old English alliterative line, a line divided into two parts, each of two stresses, with the stressed words of each part linked by alliteration. Rhyme scheme and stanza form alike were unknown to Old English literature. Only in Middle English did stanzaic verse form emerge – a striking innovation derived from and modelled on stanzaic lyrics in Old French and Medieval Latin literature.

Along with this new verse form there appeared an equally novel feature in the content of Middle English secular love lyrics: here, for the first time in English literature, poets write of love in terms of absolute devotion and service to a lady. The poet suffers in his love-longing for his lady; his life is wholly dependent on her; he beseeches her to have mercy on him; he pledges his life-long loyalty to her; her love is the only remedy for his distress. This mode of love-longing was unlike anything hitherto encountered in English poetry. Occasionally a cry of love was heard in Old English, as in the following lines translated from the enigmatic poem Wulf and Eadwacer:

Here, however, the speaker is not a man but a woman. In the heroic world of Old English poetry a man's concern centred on his duty to his lord; his ruling values were those of loyalty and courage. Love as devotion to a lady was as yet unknown as an ideal let alone as an all-consuming passion.