Semantics of European poetry is shaped by conservative forces: The relationship between poetic meter and meaning in accentual-syllabic verse

Abstract

Recent advances in cultural analytics and large-scale computational studies of art, literature and film often show that long-term change in the features of artistic works happens gradually. These findings suggest that conservative forces that shape creative domains might be underestimated. To this end, we provide the first large-scale formal evidence of the association between poetic meter and semantics in 18-19th century European literatures, using Czech, German and Russian collections with additional data from English poetry and early modern Dutch songs. Our study traces this association through a series of unsupervised classifications using the abstracted semantic features of poems that are inferred for individual texts with the aid of topic modeling. Topics alone enable recognition of the meters in each observed language, as may be seen from the same-meter samples clustering together (median Adjusted Rand Index between 0.48 and 1 across traditions). In addition, this study shows that the strength of the association between form and meaning tends to decrease over time. This may reflect a shift in aesthetic conventions between the 18th and 19th centuries as individual innovation was increasingly favored in literature. Despite this decline, it remains possible to recognize semantics of the meters from past or future, which suggests the continuity in meter-meaning relationships while also revealing the historical variability of conditions across languages. This paper argues that distinct metrical forms, which are often copied in a language over centuries, also maintain long-term semantic inertia in poetry. Our findings highlight the role of the formal features of cultural items in influencing the pace and shape of cultural evolution.

Metre and Semantics in the Poetry of Czech Post-Symbolists Accessed via LDA Topic Modelling

“…To model the semantics, we use Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA; Blei, Ng, Jordan 2003), which has become a common practice in large-scale semantic analyses of poetry (Navarro-Colorado 2018;Haider 2019;Plecháč, Haider 2020;Šeļa et al 2020;Šeļa et al 2022). To reduce lexical variability, we perform the common pre-processing steps: we rely on lemmatised texts and remove all parts of speech except for nouns, adjectives and verbs.…”

The fall of genres that did not happen: formalising history of the “universal” semantics of Russian iambic tetrameter

“…We rely on topic modeling to find more abstracted groups of words that share similar behavior, appear in similar contexts with each other, which often is a signal of an underlying shared theme, or semantic domain. Topic models are widely used in information extraction tasks and were multiple times proven to be a robust method of inferring themes in poetry (Navarro-Colorado 2018; Plecháč, Haider 2020), including its application to the problem of semantic halo (Šeļa et al 2022;Plecháč, Kolár 2022).…”

“…Previous large-scale studies (Gasparov 2012;Šeļa et al 2022) show that stable relationship between semantics and form exists not only in less frequent meters, but also in wide-spread forms that became central to a tradition: for example, iambic pentameter in English, trochaic and iambic pentameters in Czech, iambic tetrameter in Russian. Commonly used meters, however, are often described as being "universal", or semantically "neutral": potentially any theme can be encountered within them.…”