When did you last immerse yourself in a pool of make-believe? In a television drama, or a film, watched from the sofa or a cinema seat? A story you read to your children last night, or the novel you settled down with later? The comic strip in this morning’s newspaper? A joke you heard at work or around the table? Chances are that the last fictional story you encountered was not long ago, and the previous one not long before that.When did you last encounter verse? Again, probably not long ago, in song or hymn lyrics or in advertising jingles. Had you lived in Homer’s day, or in Virgil’s, Dante’s, or Chaucer’s, or even in Shakespeare’s or Byron’s, you might have met story and verse together; but more recent ways of telling stories on page and screen make you unlikely to reach for verse when you crave a story. And when did most of us who are not poets or literature teachers or students last read a serious poem, or a book of poems?“Poetry” has no rhyme in English. Even for many literature students, the first near-rhyme for “poetry” to leap to mind might well be “lavatory,” somewhere they’d rather not linger. They just don’t “get” poetry, they confess: verse, what could be worse?Yet even those who profess not to understand poetry enjoy rhymes in rock songs, punchy rhythms in rap, playful alliterations and puns in advertising and headlines. They and others enjoyed nursery rhymes, schoolyard chants and rhyming games when they were children, and will pass some of them on to their children.Like others, I feel confident we can learn more about literature and life by discovering more about the why and how of our minds. How might evolution (the why) and cognition (the how) explain why we love the ingredients of poetry but why so many find the whole dish of literary poetry a little heavy, oversauced, hard to digest? And why despite that do some poems invite endless re-savoring?I hope Why Lyrics Last might encourage those who have resisted poetry to recognize that they are not alone, that they already like a great deal of what goes into poetry, and that they can learn to like even tricky lyrics.Shakespeare’s Sonnets offer a great place to start: some obviously, immediately, compellingly appealing; others puzzling in themselves and their relations to those before and after. If you don’t read them with the wrong expectations—that they are narrative, a narrative you’re just not getting—you can find different kinds of surprises and pleasures, some immediate, others delayed until you reread and re-savor.Like many a lyric poet, Shakespeare can make his sonnets a series of hide-and-seek games. Accept the invitation to discovery and you have a chance to explore intimately, even across centuries, the recesses of an extraordinary mind.I began On the Origin of Stories with evolution and cognition. In Why Lyrics Last my strategy shifts. I focus on literary problems here not to construct a comprehensive biocultural model, but simply to draw on evolutionary and cognitive insights as they illuminate this or that, often in unexpected ways. For instance: the imbalance in number and size between sperm and eggs underlies—not that they knew it—the structure of the sonnets sequences that Shakespeare and his contemporaries inherited from Petrarch, and the problems inherent in the form, and the boldness of Shakespeare’s solutions in refreshing the form.And this in turns leads into a wider issue: the role of problems and solutions, and costs and benefits, in literary studies—and indeed wherever we try to understand what people do.Problems emerged with life, and evolution tracks successions of accumulated solutions. Each individual too faces a partly common, partly unique set of problems: for a writer, what to write next, for instance, how to hold an audience’s attention, and how to keep down the invention costs of a new composition while amplifying the benefits.Shakespeare was in a unique position when he began writing his sonnets. He had already set new standards in comedy, tragedy, and history, and in comic and tragic narrative verse, when he turned to lyrics to show what he, and poetry, could do without narrative.Shakespeare had also recognized that sonnet sequences’ very mode of earning attention also threatened their lasting hold on readers. He alone among his contemporaries found ways of writing a sonnet sequence bold enough and sly enough to earn readers’ attention—and puzzlement—for centuries.As readers too we face problems when choosing what to read next, what’s worth our attention in the face of competing demands, how to maximize the benefit to us of what we read while keeping the costs acceptably low. Understanding the problems facing particular writers at particular moments can help reduce the cost and raise the benefit of reading their work.I’ve tried to make it more possible for readers of lyrics and readers of Shakespeare’s sonnets to see what lyrics in general, and the Sonnets in particular, do, and why. What are the problems good lyric writers and readers set themselves? How does understanding the special problems Shakespeare posed himself in his one lyric collection allow us to keep finding richer solutions to both the most admired and the most neglected of his sonnets?