Within the loose system of literary genres that existed in the passage from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, lyric has an especially problematic trajectory. For one thing, lyric is always – even today – the most fugitive of genres when it comes to a theory of its identity. And for another, the period in question is probably the starting point of the modern idea of lyric productions as short, intense, and exquisite redactions of impassioned speech – a notion that is much further developed in the Romantic period, but has recognizable beginnings in the early Renaissance. One consequence of this latter view is that lyric theory comes to seem almost a contradiction in terms: where it is assumed that speech can be idealized into poetry and poetry naturalized into speech, a poetics of lyric like those of epic or drama can seem beside the point. Moreover, the disparity between the available terms of lyric theory and the actual productions of the genre becomes arrestingly evident in this period. In many ways the most acute poetics of the early modern lyric is written out in poems themselves, such as Garcilaso de la Vega's Egloga tercera (written c. 1526, published 1543) and Edmund Spenser's Shepheardes calender (1579), where poets and their audiences often find the common ground for genre orientated conversation they otherwise lack. Hence the emergence of lyric in this period – its separation from the other genres, its theory and practice – must be sought in many untoward places, and witnessed alongside other events.