Lyric Logic: How Modern American Poetry Reasons by Winant, Johanna

Lyric Logic: How Modern American Poetry Reasons (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780231217460)

Vendor: Johanna Winant
Product type: Books
Format: Hardcover
$130.00
$130.00
$130.00
Subtotal: $130.00
Lyric Logic: How Modern American Poetry Reasons by Winant, Johanna

Lyric Logic: How Modern American Poetry Reasons

$130.00
Lyric Logic: How Modern American Poetry Reasons by Winant, Johanna

Lyric Logic: How Modern American Poetry Reasons

$130.00
Format: Hardcover
Description
Description
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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.

Author: Johanna Winant
ISBN-10: 0231217463
ISBN-13: 9780231217460
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Language: English
Published: 04/28/2026
Pages: 272
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.18lbs
By Johanna Winant
By Johanna Winant
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Johanna Winant is associate professor of English and humanities at Reed College. She is coeditor, with Dan Sinykin, of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century (2025).

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