Poetic meter & meaning

I study the role of poetic forms in maintaining divergent poetic traditions, or, as it is known, semantic halo of meter

Why do poetic meters ‘sound’ different? Some might even suggest that they have inherent meanings or purposes. The short answer to this question is that all poetic forms have a different history; they were used differently in the past and formed specific expectation horizons (often quite fuzzy). The long answer can be found in my work (that expands on previous fundamental research) (Šeļa, Plecháč, and Lassche 2022; Šeļa, Orekhov, and Leibov 2020; Martynenko and Šeļa 2023), where I formally demonstrate that semantic features alone can predict poetic meter across traditions and languages.

CW: LDA, clustering, adjusted Rand index, time travel.

References

Martynenko, Antonina, and Artjoms Šeļa. 2023. “The Fall of Genres That Did Not Happen: Formalising History of the ‘Universal’ Semantics of Russian Iambic Tetrameter.” Studia Metrica Et Poetica 10 (2): 89–111. https://doi.org/10.12697/smp.2023.10.2.04.

Šeļa, Artjoms, Boris Orekhov, and Roman Leibov. 2020. “Weak Genres: Modeling Association Between Poetic Meter and Meaning in Russian Poetry.” In CHR 2020: Workshop on Computational Humanities Research, 12–31. Amsterdam: CEUR-WS. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2723/long35.pdf.

Šeļa, Artjoms, Petr Plecháč, and Alie Lassche. 2022. “Semantics of European Poetry Is Shaped by Conservative Forces: The Relationship Between Poetic Meter and Meaning in Accentual-Syllabic Verse.” PLOS ONE 17 (4): e0266556. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0266556.