A Computational Approach to Style in American Poetry
David M. Kaplan David M. Blei
We develop a quantitative method to assess the style of American poems and to
visualize a collection of poems in relation to one another. Qualitative poetry
criticism helped guide our development of metrics that analyze various
orthographic, syntactic, and phonemic features. These features are used to
discover comprehensive stylistic information from a poem's multi-layered latent
structure, and to compute distances between poems in this space. Visualizations
provide ready access to the analytical components. We demonstrate our method on
several collections of poetry, showing that it better delineates poetry style
than the traditional word-occurrence features that are used in typical text
analysis algorithms. Our method has potential applications to academic research
of texts, to research of the intuitive personal response to poetry, and to
making recommendations to readers based on their favorite poems.