Lyric Thinking Across Disciplines

How does lyric poetry move through the world? What place does it have in our cultural, social, political worlds? And why do lyrics—whether understood as literary masterpieces or the words to our favorite songs—continue to touch us in both “body and soul”? Lyric Thinking Across Disciplines creates a shared research space at Yale for scholars and poets to think through these questions, which cut across so many disciplines and languages. Lyric Thinking brings together colleagues in Classics, Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages and Literature, English, Humanities, and Music—along with partners in the Yale Library’s Special Collections and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library—for a series of workshops that bridge lyric theory and poetic praxis. These workshops invite participants to push past the norms and canons of their own disciplines to rethink, together, the incredible persistence of lyric forms across various cultures, time periods, and media.