Since antiquity, poets have described their experience of versification as one of constraint. The introduction examines examples of this trope, and introduces the book’s central claim: that voluntary submission to formal constraints effaces the poetries and experiences of those who are actually in bondage. It discusses the way poets and critics have aligned the imposition or radical overthrow of formal constraints with conservative or revolutionary politics, and offers some working definitions of lyric. Close readings of a sonnet by Keats, and a discussion of J. S. Mill’s essay ‘What is Poetry’, establish the book’s historicist perspective on the ‘liberal lyric’ in relation to the histories of slavery. The introduction also explains the methodology, and situates my own critical practice in relation to whiteness as a kind of enclosure.