在诗歌研究领域，目前英美世界存在两种主流观念。一种是浪漫主义式的，将抒情诗视作主体经验与情感的强烈表达；另一种是摹仿式的，将诗歌视作对某个由诗人创造的虚构人物的思想或话语的摹仿，因此往往采取虚构文本的分析方法与策略来解读诗歌。这两种模式都不能成为描述和解读抒情诗的“默认”模式，因为它们忽略了抒情诗的一些根本特征，即所有那些从根本上导向施为而非再现的元素。此外，抒情诗尽管可能包含虚构元素，但一般来说它们并不创造虚构世界，而是提出有关世界的看法。某些诗歌促使读者想象一个主体和一个说话的声音，但对很多诗歌来说，音响效果与其说是对声音的摹仿，不如说是某种可以被称之为“声效”的东西。

Two conceptions of the lyric have come to dominate the study of poetry in the Anglo-American world: the Romantic model, which considers lyric as an intense expression of subjective experience and emotion, and the mimetic model that treats poetry as the thought or speech of a persona created by the poet, therefore adopting methods and strategies used in analysing fictional texts. Neither of these two can be the "default model" for describing and interpreting lyrics because of their neglect of the fundamental characteristics of lyrics: all those elements which are fundamentally directions for performance rather than representations. Moreover, while lyrics may contain fictional elements in general they do not create fictional worlds but make statements about our world. And while some poems work to induce readers to imagine a human subject and a speaking voice, for many the vocal effects are what can be called "voicing" rather than mimesis of voice.