Between the Civil War and the Cold War, American literary modernism and philosophy were both trying to understand novelty. In Lyric Logic, Johanna Winant argues that modern poetry does philosophic work not just through its content but through its form, bringing literary modernism and the problem of induction together as parallel ways of grappling with the unexpected. Through close readings of major modernist poets, she shows how poetic techniques like the catalogue and imagery can also be recognized as rigorous forms of reasoning. In this Q&A Winant explains how poetry doesn’t just illustrate or allude to philosophy—it does philosophy.

Q: What is this book about?

Johanna Winant: Most briefly: Lyric Logic shows that modern American poetry does philosophic work, not just through its content but through its form.

Or, alternatively:, this book shows that two different stories—modernism in literary studies and the problem of induction in philosophy—are sometimes the same story. Both are about destabilizing and enriching encounters with the new and unexpected. Inductive reasoning is the epistemological method by which one works from particular facts to general laws or theories; the problem of induction identifies the unreliability of this reasoning for predicting future events based only on past ones. This problem surfaces as an urgent topic in a broad swath of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American philosophy, from pragmatism to logical positivism. Attention to induction in philosophy coincided with the emergence of literary modernism not because poets reflected or illustrated philosophical issues, but because both philosophy and poetry participated in a larger, fundamental question in modernity’s intellectual history: how to understand and represent the new.

Or, a more fun version: I sometimes describe my book as parent-trapping philosophy and literature—seeing if, at summer camp, these two disciplines recognize someone else with their own face on, if they can know each other. The philosopher Stanley Cavell at the very end of his magnum opus, The Claim of Reason, asks, “Can philosophy become literature and still know itself?” What’s most important is that if philosophy and literature can see, or even be, each other, they can know themselves better. For much of the book, I send philosophy home to literary studies: I show how poetry is philosophical as poetry, through its poetics, by using philosophical terms to describe the logical capacity of poetic techniques like comparison and the catalogue. And in the conclusion, I send literature home to philosophy by writing about the sonnet. With the sonnet, poetics has a name for a form—a logical and poetic form—that philosophy doesn’t. I make a claim for what poetics has long known about its own relation to reasoning and also its own resources.

Q: Which poets do you discuss?

Winant: My chapters focus on five American poets: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop; my conclusion analyzes poetry by Gwendolyn Brooks. But although these poets are all major figures already recognized as central to American modernism, they are not usually thought of as philosophical poets. There are a handful of poets who are usually identified as philosophically ambitious, such as Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and T. S. Eliot. I discuss poems by Pound and Stevens in the introduction to Lyric Logic, but I argue that poetry, including theirs, can be philosophical in how it reasons, not just in what it might reason about. Whether or not a poem refers or alludes to philosophy, whether or not it’s wise or even thoughtful, it can be philosophical in its logical form. And although the poets I discuss have sometimes been recognized as formally experimental, that is not neatly synonymous with aesthetically experimental. I argue that often their poems have been miscategorized as aesthetically experimental. They actually are using established forms, just those of philosophic logic.

Q: Is there a particular moment you would point to as the origin of this book?

Winant: Two converging paths led me here. First, as a scholar of modernism, I wondered why there aren’t more varied accounts of the ambitions of modern poetry’s formal innovations. We often describe modernist poetry as reacting against—say, against Victorian poetry or the horrors of the First World War—but where’s the positive account? What is it reaching for? And second, as a longtime reader of philosophy, especially analytic philosophy, I often felt like I was reading surprisingly parallel but inverse conversations. For example, in a graduate seminar on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, I would listen as philosophy PhD students debated how the analogy behind his beetle-in-a-box thought experiment worked in reasoning about the minds of others; then I would go home and read Emily Dickinson’s poetry and map out her analogies. I wanted to bring these conversations together. What would it mean to think about Dickinson’s comparisons not as metaphors—not as imagery that illustrates her thought—but as analogies capable of reasoning? Of being not general thought but a rigorous mode of logic? Or, similarly, Plato claims that poetry does not contain knowledge, but what if we could reframe this so that the question was not a question of containing—of content—but of form? Because, in addition to how philosophers call thought experiments what we call imagery, what they call enumerative induction is what we call the poetic catalogue.

Q: Does this book have a hero?

Winant: This book has an antihero: the philosopher David Hume, who writes, “That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction than the affirmation, that it will rise.” This is his famous example of the problem of induction, which, along with the problem of other minds, is one of the two great skeptical problems that inaugurated modern philosophy. Other minds has long been a way of conceptualizing the lyric poem (here I’m grouping together a huge number of thinkers ranging from John Stuart Mill and Allen Grossman and so many others who talk about the lyric in relation to making another person’s interiority apparent). In contrast, the problem of induction has been discussed some, but not by as many people, and not relative to the modern lyric poem. But the modern lyric poem is already characterized by its encounter with novelty and its representation of it—it makes it new—and novelty is exactly what Hume is talking about. Grossman is among the heroes of this book, as is Cavell, who also takes on the problem of other minds and taught me how literature can rotate a philosophical problem and teach us how to take it seriously without being crippled by it. Modern poetry’s power is in how it takes on novelty as not just a necessity but a virtue. So another hero is Marianne Moore, whose pangolin, I argue, responds to Hume by greeting the rising sun each day:

       “Again the sun!
                        anew each day; and new and new and new,
                        that comes into and steadies my soul.”