Lyric Logic

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. -- Marjorie Levinson, author of <i>Thinking through Poetry: Field Reports on Romantic Lyric</i> With philosophical precision and aesthetic sensitivity, Johanna Winant offers us a modern American poetry of explanation, in which the boundless novelty of experience meets the formal rigor of systematic thought. Technical and buoyant in equal measure, Lyric Logic vindicates an epistemic project for which art is an appropriate—perhaps the inevitable—vehicle. It is a pleasure to think with. -- Oren Izenberg, author of <i>Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life</i> Winant shows her readers a world in which contingent details reveal truth and literature yields rational claims. Lyric Logic maintains a dialogue between philosophical and poetic problems with exemplary precision. -- Theo Davis, author of <i> Ornamental Aesthetics: The Poetry of Attending in Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman</i> Finally, we're out of the language of ""the logic of"" and placed into actual logic. Poetry in Winant's account is something that imposes logical strictness on itself—even poetry that looks stranger than our wildest imagination. Such poetry still reasons by induction, a series of ""if this, then what."" Lyric Logic is a beautifully precise defense of close-reading as comprehension and comprehension as something that needs sound logic and that can follow sound logic quite far. -- Nan Z. Da, author of <i>Intransitive Encounter: Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange</i>