The review considers Guido Mazzoni’s concept explained in the Italian theoretician’s study of modern poetry. The author examines the genesis of the lyric, highlighting its main milestones, from its use by Petrarch to the radical subjectification by Romanticists. Mazzoni interprets this process as a departure from ritualized forms in favour of the total freedom of self-expression achieved by avant-garde poets. The scholar dwells on the comparison between the Western and Russian traditions, indicating their common ground as well as fundamental differences. He argues that the national tradition of the perception of Russian poetry was shaped by the early 20th century’s preference for a dialogue with tradition and the discovery of the dialogic nature of words. In Mazzoni’s concept, poetry reaches the apotheosis of individualism and reclusiveness, and faces a crisis of the Romanticist worldview that prompted the arrival of the avant-garde. This, in turn, encourages a search for alternative paths of development, which the Russian poetic tradition successfully identified.