This seminar (a sequel to a well-attended seminar at ACLA 2024) is interested in how lyric poetry has been conceptualized and practiced as a distinctive form of thinking. The inquiry it proposes intersects with familiar questions about poetry’s epistemological capacities: e.g., how do poems think in ways that are different from the “ordinary” operations of reason? But it also aspires to a more expansive treatment of the question—an expansion that seems especially urgent in a contemporary moment in which the understanding of thinking (cognition, intelligence, sensation) is again under dizzying revision. 

What kinds of thinking have been understood to be specific to lyric at particular historical moments? How have poets conceived of lyric poetry’s contributions to political, historical, or ethical thought? What roles have rhyme, meter, and rhythm played in conceptualizing poetic thinking? How might lyric’s distinctively figurative language conceive forms of thought inaccessible by other means? What connections exist between the history of cognition and the history of poetic practice?

The seminar is again open to the widest possible variety of methodological and historical approaches. We welcome papers that pursue critical, historical, linguistic, cognitive psychological, and historically- or culturally-comparative accounts of lyric cognition. What do computational literary studies reveal about lyric thinking? How might advances in the development of generative AI engender or inform new approaches to the study of lyric? What does lyric thinking look like outside the Anglo-American tradition or before the “lyricization of poetry”? How might comparative approaches illuminate the kinds of thinking in which lyric is engaged? 

We invite papers on these topics or any other aspect of lyric thinking.