Lyric Logic

How Modern American Poetry Reasons

Inbunden, Engelska, 2026

AvJohanna Winant

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Between the Civil War and the Cold War, American literary modernism and philosophy both grappled with the challenge of novelty and the chance to make it new. Bringing together modern poetry’s aesthetic experimentation and modern philosophy’s attention to the problem of induction, Lyric Logic argues that poems use logical form as literary form. The modern poem can be characterized by its logic: details that appear fragmentary add up to sense-making.Johanna Winant recasts the poetics of central figures as modeling and defending inductive reasoning: Walt Whitman makes lists, Emily Dickinson constructs analogies, Gertrude Stein presents facts, Marianne Moore investigates predictions, Elizabeth Bishop draws inferences, and Gwendolyn Brooks tests the limits of deduction. Winant offers in-depth close readings of canonical poems that show the sophistication of their philosophic logic. Although philosophers tend to see induction as flawed and unreliable, these poets display its strengths. Their work demonstrates how to make sense of the unpredictable modern world.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2026-04-28
Mått152 x 229 x undefined mm
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor272
FörlagColumbia University Press
ISBN9780231217460

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It seems intuitive that lyric poems proceed in inductive fashion, assembling particulars until the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. However, saying that inductive reasoning is the special work of lyric and a philosophical project in its own right, is an entirely new claim and a bold one. Winant turns our intuition about lyric into a research question. What are inductive reasoning’s special techniques? What is the nature of its validity? Are there moments when poetry actively borrows from philosophies defending induction? Winant answers these questions both directly and through powerful new readings of major U.S. poetries from Walt Whitman through Gwendolyn Brooks. And, by showing how poems themselves “close read the world,” Lyric Logic offers a compelling defense of that method without disparaging other critical approaches, a striking achievement all on its own.