The innovations of the poets of the late Cinquecento (Tasso, Strozzi, Guarini, Rinaldi and others) provide evidence of a culture prone to experimentalism in polemic – more or less openly declared – with the Bembist variety of Renaissance classicism. The novelty is immediately perceived on the formal level: the poetic discourse relies not so much on a system of thematic correlations as on tropes, on the quality of single words (rare, polysemic), similes and metaphors, a new emphasis which will ultimately lead to concettismo. And musicality becomes a pre-eminent feature – which explains why the madrigal becomes a favourite poetical form. On the thematic level, we see that the canzone, and lyric poetry in general, move away from ‘high’ themes – considered more appropriate for epic and tragedy – in favour of ‘occasional’ themes of middling level, including daily and vulgar subjects. On the other hand, new ‘high’ themes acquire a new and sustained role, above all patriotic, moral and religious themes which were practically unknown to the lyric poems of the previous generations who sang primarily of love. Each of the main trends in the seventeenth-century lyric – the light or ‘melic’, the extreme Baroque, the moderate and the classicist – can be seen as emphatic forms of features present in poetry at the turn of the century. We will consider them in turn.