Plotting Poetry (and Poetics) 3 / Machiner la poésie (et la poétique) 3, the third convocation of an international group of scholars who share an interest in the machine-assisted exploration of poetry and poetics, met on 26–27 September 2019 in Nancy at the ATILF (Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française) Laboratory, part of the Université de Lorraine and of the CNRS (Centre National

The article discusses the problems of poetic rhythm in two aspects. The first concerns the possibility of awareness and conscious modelling of various aspects of poetic rhythm; the second is related to the manifestation of similar or even identical tendencies in the rhythmic structures of various authors who belong to different eras and literary trends and even writing in different languages. Works

The article focuses on the relationship of language and metre in case of oral poetry, more exactly, to what extent and through which processes the changes in language have induced the changes in metre in case of Estonian runosong, a branch of common Finnic poetic-musical tradition. The Estonian language has gone through a series of notable phonological changes during approximately last 500 to 700 years

This is an instrumental exploration of theoretical issues related to the vocal performance of Mediaeval Hebrew pegs-and-cords meter, of which we have neither authentic recordings, nor verbal descriptions of actual performances of the time. Consequently, I am exploring only possibilities implied by poetic structures as embodied in later performances, not in actual authentic performances. But, in my

This article describes pilot experiments performed as one part of a longterm project examining the possibilities for using versification analysis to determine the authorships of poetic texts. Since we are addressing this article to both stylometry experts and experts in the study of verse, we first introduce in detail the common classifiers used in contemporary stylometry (Burrows’ Delta, Argamon’s

In the field of metrics, it has long been observed that verse lines tend to be more regular or restricted towards the end (Arnold 1905). This has led to the Strict End Hypothesis [SEH], which proposes a general versification principle of universal scope (Hayes 1983). This paper argues that two main challenges hinder the substantiation of the SEH in a broad typological sample of unrelated verse corpora

In this paper, I analyze Russian translations and close imitations of Spanish Romancero poetry composed between 1789 and the 1930s, as well as Russian original poems of the same period marked by “Spanish” motifs. I discuss the Spanish romance as an international European genre, and show how this verse form’s distinctive features were transferred into Russian poetry and how the Russian version – or

Vyacheslav V. Ivanov was an outstanding scholar who excelled in almost all disciplines related to linguistic and literary studies. This article analyses his accomplishments in the fields of prosody and poetics.

Rapikwenty is a traditional Australian Indigenous set of stories-and-songs from the Utopia region of Central Australia performed by Anmatyerr speaking adults to lull children to sleep. The main protagonist is a boy who is left to play alone in the ashes. Like many lullabies, Rapikwenty is characterised by scary themes, soft dynamics, a limited pitch range and repetition. The story-and-song form is

In Russom (2011), I defended a universalist hypothesis that the constituents of poetic form are abstracted from natural linguistic constituents: metrical positions from phonological constituents, usually syllables; metrical feet from morphological constituents, usually words; and metrical lines from syntactic constituents, usually sentences. An important corollary to this hypothesis is that norms for

In 2014, the project CEILE (Corpus Electronicum Inscriptionum Latinarum Estoniae, EKKM 14-364) was launched within the framework of the program “Estonian language and cultural memory”, in order to systematically map and study the Latin inscriptions created before 1918 and stored in Estonian Lutheran and Catholic churches. As of 2018, the database contains more than 300 inscriptions. Although the proportion

John Marston (c. 1576–1634) was a dramatist of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, known for his satirical wit and literary feuds with Ben Jonson. His dramatic corpus consists of nine plays of uncontested authorship. This article investigates four additional plays of uncertain authorship which have been associated with Marston: Lust’s Dominion; Histriomastix; The Family of Love; and The Insatiate

This paper is focused on the “semantic halo of meter” («семантический ореол метра»), one of the most recognizable, popular, and widely used concepts in Russian verse studies. After the publication of Kiril Taranovsky’s article “On the Relationships between Verse Rhythm and Theme” (1963), in which the author addresses the issue by looking at the Russian trochaic pentameter and deals with one particular

The word “Knittelvers” has been used since the eighteenth century to describe four-stress rhyming couplets which seem to be rather simply and awkwardly constructed, and whose content is frequently comical, course, vulgar or obscene. Today German Knittelvers is perhaps best known from the works of Goethe and Schiller, as well as other late eighteenth and early nineteenth century writers. Well-known

On 29–30 September 2017, a conference titled Frontiers in Comparative Metrics III was held at Tallinn University. The first conference in this series was held in 2008 in memory of Mikhail Gasparov, and the second in 2013 in memory of Lucylla Pszczołowska. This year’s conference was dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the eminent Estonian scholar, Jaak Põldmäe, who was the founder of scientific Estonian

The first sonnets in Estonian language were published almost 650 years after this verse form was invented by Federico da Lentini in Sicily, in the late of 19th century. Sonnet form became instantly very popular in Estonia and has since remained the most important fixed form in Estonian poetry. Despite its widespread presence over time the last comprehensive research on Estonian sonnet was written in

During its early years this network was called ‘NorMod’, short for Nordic Modernism. Nowadays our home page is named ‘NorLyr’1. ‘Lyr’ is short for ‘lyrik’, which in Swedish means all kinds of poems. This change is due to that focus little by little has moved to the examination of the very latest literary achievements, poetry after the millennium shift, more than only modernism. The network was founded

The international conference Plotting Poetry: On Mechanically Enhanced Reading was organised by Anne-Sophie Bories, Hugues Marchal (both University of Basel), and Gérald Purnelle (Liège University) held in Basel, Switzerland from 5 to 7 October 2017. This conference comprised 26 presentations in English and French, delivered by scholars from eleven different countries and devoted to a wide range of

There have been various interpretations of W. B. Yeats’s “The Cap and Bells”, but little attention has been paid to those elements of its organization which make it effective as poetry. This article is concerned less with what the poem means than with how it means, through the choice and placement of words, phrases, and images in a sequence that not only tells a story but shapes it so as to engage

The second half of the fourteenth century saw a large uptick in the production of literature in English. This essay frames metrical variety and literary experimentation in the late fourteenth century as an opportunity for intellectual history. Beginning from the assumption that verse form is never incidental to the thinking it performs, the essay seeks to test Simon Jarvis’s concept of “prosody as

The paper studies long-term changes in the length of Russian poetry (1750–1921) to reveal the relation of poem length (counted in lines) to a poetic form and its evolution. The research has shown a dramatic decrease in the mean and median poetry lengths during the 19th century. This decrease was followed by the decline in length diversity, which resulted in short poems (8–20 lines) overpopulating the

Seiichi Suzuki, The Meters of Old Norse Eddic Poetry: Common Germanic Inheritance and North Germanic Innovation (Erganzungsbande zum Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, Band 86). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2014. XLV+1096 pp.

Arvo Krikmann was, among many other things, an Estonian academician, folklorist, linguist, paremiologist, and humour researcher. Working in folklore departments at the Estonian Literary Museum, Institute of Estonian Language and Literature, and University of Tartu, his main resources for study throughout his career had been voluminous archival collections of Estonian folklore, as well as the early

The series of biannual conferences devoted to Finnic runo-song tradition in Tartu, Estonia had its ninth event “Seven skins of runo-song: various views on Finnic song tradition” on November 30 and December 1, 2016 at the Estonian Literary Museum. The aim of the conference series that started in 2000 is to offer a regular forum to all the researchers studying Finnic oral song tradition in broadest sense

It is hard to imagine more versatile a scholar of poetry than Jaak Põldmäe (1942–1979). In the course of his short life (particularly short for a humanist scholar) he made a significant contribution to the development of various areas of verse theory and the dissemination of knowledge of poetics. Põldmäe paid equal attention to both the development of verse theory (see his works on the typology of

This essay integrates what I have written on the contribution of meter and rhythm to emotional qualities in poetry, opposing them to emotional contents . I distinguish between “meaning-oriented” approaches and “perceived effects” approaches, adopting the latter; and adopt a qualitative (rather than quantitative) method of research. Providing a simplified list of structural elements of emotion, I explore

This paper examines the versification style of the Romansh poet Andri Peer, who can be considered as the first “modern” poet of the Romansh literature. It focuses on Andri Peer’s most frequently used verse lines in his early free forms: the heptasyllabic and hendecasyllabic verse. A rhythmical analysis of the single verse instances revealed that the internal organisation of the line is not very elaborate

From the very beginning of systematic investigation of the Russian iambic tetrameter (1910s–1940s), the proportion of stresses on the first and second ictus of the line was chosen as its main rhythmic characteristic. Meanwhile, attributing an aesthetic value to this characteristic is wrong: it is largely dependent on the changing speech norm in the late 18th an early 19th century. The general trend

The present study concentrates on specific linguistic aspects in traditional Estonian poetic texts. Focusing on the verse structure of the traditional folk song of Vana kannel and the individually edited and authored epic poem Kalevipoeg , different aspects of the length of verse lines, of the words included in these verses, and of the relation between verse and word length shall be analyzed, aiming

This article examines two related matters that have heretofore received little attention in the scholarly literature. The first is whether the division into stanzas shown on the page always reflects the thematic and formal structure of the poem. For instance, may 8-line stanzas with a repeated rhyme scheme (such as ababcdcd) in fact represent pairs of quatrains arbitrarily joined together? Conversely

The poet and artist Oyvind Fahlstrom (1928–1976) was the leader of the Scandinavian avant-garde during the fifties and the beginning of the sixties. He wrote his only collection of poetry Bord [ Tables ] in 1952–1955, but it was not published until 1966. In this book he applies the aesthetic ideas of his two manifestos – signification is what matters in poetry but signification emanates out of the

Boris Isaakovich Yarkho (1889–1942)1 was a major and unique figure in literary scholarship during the 1920s and 1930s. However, his name is usually recalled less frequently than the names of many of his contemporaries. The circumstances of Yarkho’s life and work prevented his most important research from being published. Therefore the general panorama of his completed work and his projects for further

These days a lot has been said about literary form, and not without reason. On the contrary, I think that most of those working in this field are on the right track, trying to find and identify what the history and theory of literature should in fact study. Therefore, if I venture to write a few lines on these issues, it is not because I want to argue with anyone, but only because I would like to introduce

This paper examines the prose rhythm in Dante’s Latin and Italian prose. The samples of Dante’s Latin books De vulgari eloquentia and De Monarchia and the Italian book Convivio are analysed with the purpose of finding the incidence and patterns of prose rhythm. The method used in this paper is comparative-statistical analysis. The rhythm of classic prose was based on the quantity of syllables, while

This article is devoted to translations of poetry that are not equivalent to the original on the lexical level, but attempt to reproduce the sound, rhythm and syntax of the source text. The Russian formalist Yuri Tynianov was presumably the first scholar to discover this phenomenon, which was later referred to as “phonetic facsimile” (George Steiner) and “homophonic translation” (Lawrence Venuti).

Weight ordering preferences appear to function in opposite directions in verse and language. While linguistic expressions, in both syntax and phonology, typically display a “long-last” effect (Cooper and Ross 1975), stanza forms often show the the opposite, “short-last” structure. This effect has been called “saliency” in previous literature (Hayes and MacEachern 1996; Kiparsky 2006). In this paper

In 2015, as in 2014, there were two panels on verse theory at the annual convention of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), which was held in Philadelphia. The following remarks are devoted to those two sessions. It should also be noted, however, that during the several days of the conference several hundred panels were held and more than 1000 individual papers were

This paper examines the frequencies of the rhythmic forms of the iambic tetrameter in the oeuvre of various Russian poets of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. The assumption is that this parameter describes the perceptible peculiarities of rhythm better than the so called stress profile. Entropy is proposed as a measure of rhythmic diversity. Variations of the quantitative value of rhythmic entropy