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Lyric Logic: How Modern American Poetry Reasons

Lyric Logic: How Modern American Poetry Reasons

by Winant, Johanna
No customer reviews yet ISBN 9780231217460

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.

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Pub dateApr 28, 2026
ISBN-100231217463
ISBN-139780231217460
LanguageEnglish
Last updated 2026-04-29 09:13
$150.45
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