"John Dolan takes a new approach to the evolution of the modern English lyric, emphasising the way in which several generations of poets, reacting to post-Reformation readers' dislike for invented poetic narratives, competed for the right to commemorate important public occasions and slowly expanded the range of acceptable occasion. This book demonstrates that many fundamental features of a typical modern lyric actually evolved as responses to the limitations of occasional poetry."
"Why do so many modern English poems begin with a lonely wanderer experiencing a private emotion? This book offers a striking new thesis: that the modern lyric poem evolved as an adaptation to the demand for `truth in poetry' by post-Reformation English readers. The demand for truth led to a preference for poems grounded in verifiable public occasions (deaths, battles, weddings). As English poets competed for the right to commemorate important occasions, they developed new ways of commemorating conventional occasions and, in a long process culminating in the revolutionary poems of the 1740s, extended the notion of 'poetic occasion' to include occasions such as the death of unknown strangers (as in Gray's Elegy) and even unverifiable mental occasions such as the epiphanies which so regularly strike Wordsworth's solitary wanderers."@en

"Poetic occasion from Milton to Wordsworth"@en
"Poetic occasion from Milton to Wordsworth"
"Poetic occasion in the evolution of the English lyric from Milton to Wordsworth"
"Poetic Occasion from Milton to Wordsworth"