Preface; Acknowledgments; 1. Exploring the poem; 2. Poetic roles in early song-lyrics; 3. Devotional poetry; 4. The rhetoric of passion; 5. Classical Antiquity and modern experience; 6. Romantic poetry and the problem of lyric unity; 7. The self and the senses; 8. Modernism and difficulty; 9. Poetry after Auschwitz; 10. The strain of political poetry; Working on the text; Writing up your close reading; German metrics; Index.