[Corpora-List] Poetry

Martin Wynne martin.wynne at oucs.ox.ac.uk
Mon Oct 9 10:10:31 UTC 2006


I doubt whether you can find what you want, for several reasons:

1. attributing any given poem to a particular style is likely to be 
highly subjective, and controversial among scholars of poetry
2. what taxonomy of types of 'poetic style' would anyone use? Are there 
agreed types and terms?
3. what level of granularity of categorisation should be used? Are there 
  sub-types ("late romantic")? Is there a hierarchy that can encompass 
all types and sub-types? How many levels does it need to have?
4. what do you do with poems that fit into more than one style, or are 
at a boundary between styles?
5. do the categories fit for poetry from different languages, countries 
or traditions, and for translations?
etc. etc.

Now, it may be that these problems can be raised with any form of 
categorisation. The way to address these sorts of problems is to find 
measures which are consistent, transparent and as objective as possible. 
I don't see how they can be found in this case, unless you know of a 
taxonomy that you can work with and which has been consistently applied 
to all the poems that you wish to look at. But I don't think that 
'style' is a sufficiently well-defined concept to be able to do this.

I'd be very interested to know more about why you want this though. 
There may be other ways to approach your research question.

Best wishes,
Martin

Alexander Osherenko wrote:
> It's probably an incorrect word 'annotation'. Actually it's important to know that a particular poem is said to be a representative of a particular style. It is not enough to assume that the poems of a particular author are all of some style since humans and also poets do change their authoring style during the life.
> 
> -------- Original-Nachricht --------
> Datum: Mon, 09 Oct 2006 10:11:17 +0100
> Von: Martin Wynne <martin.wynne at oucs.ox.ac.uk>
> An: Alexander Osherenko <osherenko at gmx.de>
> Betreff: Re: [Corpora-List] Poetry
> 
>> What do you mean by annotation?
>>
>> Alexander Osherenko wrote:
>>> Hello!
>>>
>>> Has anybody seen or maybe heard of an annotated poetry corpus? For
>> example, poem text and its annotation (romantic whatsoever). The Gutenberg
>> project is very interesting, but unfortunately without annotations.
>>> Best poetic wishes
>>>
>>> Alexander
>>
>> -- 
>> Martin Wynne
>> Head of the Oxford Text Archive and
>> AHDS Literature, Languages and Linguistics
>>
>> Oxford University Computing Services
>> 13 Banbury Road
>> Oxford
>> UK - OX2 6NN
>> Tel: +44 1865 283299
>> Fax: +44 1865 273275
>> martin.wynne at oucs.ox.ac.uk
> 


-- 
Martin Wynne
Head of the Oxford Text Archive and
AHDS Literature, Languages and Linguistics

Oxford University Computing Services
13 Banbury Road
Oxford
UK - OX2 6NN
Tel: +44 1865 283299
Fax: +44 1865 273275
martin.wynne at oucs.ox.ac.uk



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