Analysis of a Corpus of Poetry :: Poems Writing Essays

Analysis of a Corpus of Poetry A principal sum of 1000 lines of meter (ten 100 line samples from ten different authors) is open firevass by a computerized connectionist model of poetic meter. The outline finds that poets utilize measurably distinct patterns of stress and suggests that these patterns might fingerprint individual writers. In addition, the analysis shows that the variations of metrical patterns are in accord with the prevailing verse aesthetics of the period in which poets are writing.Introduction In English poetry, the bingle most compelling discriminator of that genre--that which defines a poem as a poem--has traditionally been its meter. Meter defines the length of the line, and thus the distinctive look of a poem on the page, and it sets, for the hearer of a poem, the telling regularity of a rhythm. Whether this rhythm also carries the burden of some of a poems meaning or whether it is used only for a conventional aesthetic effect th at invites the ref to take pleasure in its regularity or variations, meter is mavin of the central attributes of the genre of poetry. While the meter of a poem whitethorn or may not be strongly attended to by the poems audience, or its critics, metrics has always been a matter of substantial precaution for poets (see Addison 1994). At each point in a line of poetry one factor in the decision favoring one word or syntactic pattern over an new(prenominal) has been the metrical impact of that survival of the fittest. Moreover, the limits of choice are not merely defined by a rightness rule such as the following All stressed positions mustiness have stressed syllables and no unstressed positions may have a stressed syllable. Metrical variations, resulting in what Halle and Keyser (1971), and others, have termed metrical complexity or tension, are allowable and, in fact, produce much of the interest in a poems rhythm. Traugott (1989), for example, speaking of Audens poetry, notes that a complex metrical design can . . . be identified that complements and enriches the multifarious verbal icons functioning at other levels of the language (294). In fact, poetic rhythm may only melt down when it destroys that very sense of design that it invokes the extreme position is taken by Shklovsky (1917), who says, the problem is not one of complicating the rhythm, but of disordering of the rhythm (p.