Iconic Lyricism and Personal Perspective

It is my contention that iconic lyrics of this period register a shift in awareness of human psychology that gives them a status equal to that we might grant to major tragedies like Hamlet and King Lear, or novels such as Proust's masterpiece and War and Peace. The contemporary literary and artistic consequences of this evolution are perhaps more significant than those of the pagan models, which as pre-Christian necessarily concerned more style (such as Cicero's or Seneca's) than that later moral content. Typical artistic patterns of the Reformation period reflect the pre-eminence of the subjective point of view, particularly in its lyrics and their use of chronological perspective, which came to be seen as intrinsic to the form. English Litratur