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Hey this is cool! I tried Shakespeare's Sonnet 29 and it thinks only half the lines have the correct meter---which partly goes to show how flexible real poems c

Hey this is cool! I tried Shakespeare's Sonnet 29 and it thinks only half the lines have the correct meter---which partly goes to show how flexible real poems can be but also could highlight places your tool could be refined. I think line 1 ends in a spondee. Also in sonnets starting a line with trochee-iamb is so common you might want to accept that as metrical too. Does it use punctuation as hints? In line 6 the comma at "Featured like him," seems important to the rythym. For the ultimate challenge you should see if you can make any sense of Hopkins. :-) When I was in Classics grad school I started a metrical search engine project. The idea was to give scholars a search box with a regex-like syntax for finding lines in a corpus matching metrical features. For example you could find all the lines in Homer with feminine endings. With Perseus it's easy to get lots of Greek & Latin texts. Then you just have to scan everything, but you can program that. I had an on-paper program to do dactylic hexameter. If anyone else thinks that might be a helpful tool, let me know. (Also if you work for Thesaurus Linguae Graecae and want to hire me to write this thing, I can make availability! ;-)

jacobevelyn 7y ago
Wow, your search engine project sounds really neat! What a cool idea. Thanks for the tips re: Shakespeare and Hopkins. I'll definitely dig in there. One of the tricky things with poets like Shakespeare is that many of his sonnets' lines I personally wouldn't consider to be iambic pentameter. Take the first line of Sonnet 29 for example: if I were reading that without affectation I'd put emphasis on "When" and "men's," while iambic requires that those be unstressed. I don't know if speech patterns were different enough in Shakespeare's day that it sounded more natural with different stresses than we'd use today, but if I were evaluating that poem blind and didn't know it was Shakespeare I'd give it low marks for requiring a relatively forced inflection. Just my opinion, though!
- pjungwir 7y ago
  I was an English major in college, so maybe I'm taking some background for granted here: no one expected that good poetry had 5x14 da-DUMs without relief. (Certainly you wouldn't want to force Shakespeare to sound that way when you read it aloud.) But the most common variations were well-known and tended to feel right, letting the poet vary things enough to avoid sing-songiness but still not stand out as wrong. So a trochee in the first foot is very common. Same with a spondee in the last foot. Other feet can flip to become trochees too, but people have pointed out that it is more common in some feet than others. For example (IIRC but it's been a long time) I don't think the fourth foot flips very often, because it's hard to make it not sound bad. But those changes are "allowed" and so "it's still iambic pentameter." So it'd be cool if your algorithms could acknowledge those deviations, e.g. maybe give the line a purple-and-white shading instead of just white, or an asterisk. EDIT: A quick Google turned up this article that has a lot of the patterns I remember: https://versemeter.wordpress.com/2016/09/20/iambic-pentameter-the-principles-of-metrical-variation-part-1-feminine-endings-simple-variations/ https://versemeter.wordpress.com/2016/09/20/iambic-pentamete...
  - jacobevelyn 7y ago
    Wow, your comment plus that link is a treasure trove of information! I have very little formal poetry education so I really appreciate your insight here. I'd love to make Versepad smart enough to handle these variations (similar to how it currently handles catalexis, for example). Thanks!
  - krutulis 7y ago
    One of my own favorite explanations of meter in English is Timothy Steele's All the Fun's in How you Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification [0]. I'd be interested if anyone has other recommendations? [0]: https://www.ohioswallow.com/book/All+the+Fun%E2%80%99s+in+How+You+Say+a+Thing https://www.ohioswallow.com/book/All+the+Fun%E2%80%99s+in+Ho...
  - FreakLegion 7y ago
    This thread take me back. > but people have pointed out that it is more common in some feet than others You might enjoy this: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.149.8792&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.149... And the follow-up, a longer examination of iambic pentameter: http://linguistica.sns.it/RdL/9.1/Hanson.pdf http://linguistica.sns.it/RdL/9.1/Hanson.pdf

jacobevelyn 7y ago

Wow, your search engine project sounds really neat! What a cool idea. Thanks for the tips re: Shakespeare and Hopkins. I'll definitely dig in there. One of the tricky things with poets like Shakespeare is that many of his sonnets' lines I personally wouldn't consider to be iambic pentameter. Take the first line of Sonnet 29 for example: if I were reading that without affectation I'd put emphasis on "When" and "men's," while iambic requires that those be unstressed. I don't know if speech patterns were different enough in Shakespeare's day that it sounded more natural with different stresses than we'd use today, but if I were evaluating that poem blind and didn't know it was Shakespeare I'd give it low marks for requiring a relatively forced inflection. Just my opinion, though!

pjungwir 7y ago
I was an English major in college, so maybe I'm taking some background for granted here: no one expected that good poetry had 5x14 da-DUMs without relief. (Certainly you wouldn't want to force Shakespeare to sound that way when you read it aloud.) But the most common variations were well-known and tended to feel right, letting the poet vary things enough to avoid sing-songiness but still not stand out as wrong. So a trochee in the first foot is very common. Same with a spondee in the last foot. Other feet can flip to become trochees too, but people have pointed out that it is more common in some feet than others. For example (IIRC but it's been a long time) I don't think the fourth foot flips very often, because it's hard to make it not sound bad. But those changes are "allowed" and so "it's still iambic pentameter." So it'd be cool if your algorithms could acknowledge those deviations, e.g. maybe give the line a purple-and-white shading instead of just white, or an asterisk. EDIT: A quick Google turned up this article that has a lot of the patterns I remember: https://versemeter.wordpress.com/2016/09/20/iambic-pentameter-the-principles-of-metrical-variation-part-1-feminine-endings-simple-variations/ https://versemeter.wordpress.com/2016/09/20/iambic-pentamete...
- jacobevelyn 7y ago
  Wow, your comment plus that link is a treasure trove of information! I have very little formal poetry education so I really appreciate your insight here. I'd love to make Versepad smart enough to handle these variations (similar to how it currently handles catalexis, for example). Thanks!
- krutulis 7y ago
  One of my own favorite explanations of meter in English is Timothy Steele's All the Fun's in How you Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification [0]. I'd be interested if anyone has other recommendations? [0]: https://www.ohioswallow.com/book/All+the+Fun%E2%80%99s+in+How+You+Say+a+Thing https://www.ohioswallow.com/book/All+the+Fun%E2%80%99s+in+Ho...
- FreakLegion 7y ago
  This thread take me back. > but people have pointed out that it is more common in some feet than others You might enjoy this: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.149.8792&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.149... And the follow-up, a longer examination of iambic pentameter: http://linguistica.sns.it/RdL/9.1/Hanson.pdf http://linguistica.sns.it/RdL/9.1/Hanson.pdf