Part II explores aspects of lyric's response to modernity that fall under a broad dimension of spatiality. This part responds to two central problems and enables a sensitivity to issues that go to the heart of Decadent and aestheticist poetics. The first is the charge that the fashion for strict verse forms represented an ossification in print of an aural lyric energy, producing a poetry that appealed primarily as spatial patterns on the page. Indeed, the accusations often levelled at aestheticist poetry referred to it killing the music of poetry in the complex rhetoric of those intricate strict verse forms, forms that are themselves more readily appreciated visually. The Scottish scholar John Campbell Shairp, for example, is typical of the more conservative condemnations of this verse (Shairp was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1877 and re-elected in 1882; he was in his sixties when he wrote a piece for the Contemporary Review on ‘Aesthetic Poetry’ in the 1880s). He discusses its primary appeal to the eye, a marker, for him, of a degrading of the imagination in contrast with poetry written for the ear: ‘The ear is a more spiritual sense, and so we find the spiritual poet making sound, not sight, ally itself to the finest beauty.’ The second problem motivating this part is what was outlined in Chapter 1 as the threat of solipsism bequeathed by a Romantic idea of lyric introspection, and connected with the fate of lyric in an age of mass print circulation: a threat to the idea of lyric as a transaction (a reaching out across space) between a framing ‘I’ and ‘you’.