Shakespeare employs syllogism in the tragedy "Timon of Athens," when Timon is asked "Have you forgot me?" and replies syllogistically: "I have forgot all men; then, if thou grant'st thou art a man, I have forgot thee." Harold Bloom elaborated on this thought, noting that Shakespeare deliberately makes no efforts to make Timon likeable, so his using syllogism to reject others is entirely appropriate. Logical syllogism shows us a cold character.
Paul Fussell in "Poetic Meter and Poetic Form" used Andrew Marvell's love-call "To His Coy Mistress" to explicate poetic syllogism. Marvell gushes, "Had we but world enough, and time/This coyness, lady, were no crime." Fussell points out the first premise -- that the lovers could tolerate coyness if there were world enough and time. The second premise adds they do not have world or time. The romantic conclusion is logical: they must make love more intensely than modesty permits. Logic ironically equals quicker physicality.
An ingenious minor poet, Indira Renganathan, created an aesthetic riddle with her piece, "An Exempted Syllogism" -- "Animals are inhumane/Man is an animal/An exception I am." What appeared to be her entire syllogism was satirized, however, in the next line: "I read this/you read this/'An exception I am.'" We give lip service to human savagery except, of course, for ourselves. The syllogism leads us to the ironic and illogical nature of our own mental exemption.
A contemporary poet, Rm. Shanmugah Chettiar, recently created "Soul in a syllogism," which proposes that life exists elsewhere other than a child's body: "Soul does not exit the body at death/It has not entered the body at birth/As the child came from the parent's live seeds/So there is no exit as there was no entry." Thus syllogism, a device for explaining logic, creates genuine enigma.