Professor of Romance philology Hugo Friedrich (1904-1978) worked almost his entire life at the University of Freiburg. He is the author of outstanding works (“Classics of the French Novel”, “Montaigne”, “The Structure of Modern Lyrics”, “The Ages of Italian Lyrics”, etc.). “The Structure of Modern Lyrics” is the most interesting - the author traces the path of modern poetry from Baudelaire to the middle of the 20th century. The situation of lyric poetry, which since the mid-19th century has renounced positivism, feelings, emotions, love, landscapes and other classical assortments, turned out to be truly tragic. Rejection of any lyrical and philosophical convention, the ever-increasing alienation of artists from society with its problems, from reality - people, being, materiality, from space and time, from their readers, from themselves, the search for a “pure” absolute, a breakthrough to the magic of words - all this radically turned poetry 180 degrees and led to unprecedented “conventional” expressiveness. In the terminology of G. Friedrich, the lyrics of Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Eliot, St. John Perse, Ungaretti, Lorca, Aley-handre, Guillen acquire the meaning and charm of high spiritual perfection. According to Friedrich, the modern brilliant poetic galaxy artistically and philosophically, together with painting and music, finds itself at an unattainable height. In the appendix, the reader will find some difficult poems in the original language and in translations by Evgeniy Golovin, which give an idea of how words are combined without the generally accepted agreeing on how the new language of the new “dict” functions. It is worth noting the unusual composition of Golovin’s final essay: he examines the difficult philosophical and philological concepts of the new lyrics in elegant fragments, distinguished by depth and penetration. Translation: Evgeny Golovin