This volume deals with different attempts undertaken during the Italian Renaissance to define the nature of the “lyrical” and of individual lyrical forms (including sonnets, epigrams, canzone, ballads, madrigals, and elegies). It begins with an introductory outline of the fundamental dilemma of the era, when an attempt was made to transform the diverse traditions of lyrical writing and the various theoretical options in the literary theory of the cinquecento into a coherent system of poetics. Subsequently, the first main chapter details the different systematic approaches, influenced predominantly by a reading of Aristotelian poetics, attempted by G.G. Trissino, I.C. Scaliger, A.S. Minturno, P. Torellis, and T. Tasso. The second main chapter provides an extensive analysis of contemporary theories about the specific lyrical forms listed above. Overall, this study reveals that lyrical theory in the cinquecento remained a precarious territory: a unitary theory of poetics does not emerge, but instead, we must accept a plurality of possible proposals for a lyrical theory.