Introduction: When loneliness was new
Singing to Echo: John Milton's lady in the masque presented at Ludlow Castle
Nocturnal reveries: Anne Finch's allusive flights
Sapphic flights: Inside Alexander Pope's Grocoes
"Lonely anguish": Thomas Gray's elegiac complaints
The shells of poetry: Echoic lyric in Charloce Smith's Elegiac Sonnets
Postscript: Keats's nightingale.