This chapter prefaces the subsequent three major parts of the book with an expansion of the contexts for lyric very briefly gestured towards in the introduction. Hegel wrote that ‘To define the poetic as such or to give a description of what is poetic horrifies nearly all who have written about poetry’. In 1970 René Wellek called for critics to ‘abandon attempts to define the general nature of the lyric or the lyrical’. My study is not primarily concerned with defining the extension of the term ‘lyric’, even as it is used historically within the few decades I cover. What I offer is rather an investigation of what were considered core features of the genre (inherited by the Victorians from formative Romantic theorisations) as they run up against the radically changed circumstances of the later part of the century. It is primarily to outlining these circumstances, as well as a critical context, that I devote this initial chapter; yet I will dwell here a little on issues of definition to set up the main matter. How do we identify aestheticist ‘lyric’ poetry in the later nineteenth century? Intrinsic to the term is a connection with music and song that is often taken as a key feature of the genre throughout the ages. One might, then, invoke as the quintessential lyrical utterance of the period the songs of Ernest Dowson and A. Mary F. Robinson, the ballads of D. G. Rossetti, or the early work of W. B. Yeats. Less obvious, but with perhaps a greater claim, are Dollie Radford's poems, of which D. H. Lawrence said: ‘They make me think of the small birds in the twilight, whistling brief little tunes, but so clear, they seem like little lights in the twilight, such clear, vivid sounds.’ The terms in which he praises this ‘fine, exquisite verse’ register a particularly aesthetic quality in both poem and commentary.