37.2188, Books: From Homer to Goethe and Beyond to AI: Margolis (2025)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-2188. Thu Jun 25 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.2188, Books: From Homer to Goethe and Beyond to AI: Margolis (2025)

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Date: 25-Jun-2026
From: Jakob Margolis [jakob_margolis at gmx.de]
Subject: From Homer to Goethe and Beyond to AI: Margolis (2025)


Title: From Homer to Goethe and Beyond to AI
Subtitle: A New Comparative Approach to the Study of Poetic Language
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Berlin
           https://www.wvberlin.com/
Book URL:
https://www.wvberlin.com/pages/bakery/from-homer-to-goethe-and-beyond-to-ai-1985.php

Author(s): Jakob Margolis

ISBN: 978-3-96138-447-1, €46.00

Abstract:

This innovative volume presents a comparative and diachronic analysis
of the major works of outstanding European poets representing
different historical periods, languages, cultures, and religious
traditions. By examining the most frequently occurring nouns (key
concepts) in the original-language texts of Homer, Virgil, Dante,
Shakespeare, Pushkin, and Goethe, the author uncovers previously
unrecognized linguistic patterns and conceptual structures underlying
their poetic language.
The study is inspired by Charles Baudelaire’s observation: “To
understand the soul of a poet, or at least his principal
preoccupation, let us search in his works for the word or words that
occur most frequently.” Building upon this insight, the book traces
the evolution of key concepts across more than two millennia of
European poetry, revealing shifts in poetic consciousness and cultural
priorities through quantitative lexical analysis.
Such research has become possible only in the digital age through
advances in corpus linguistics, computational text analysis, and
linguistically annotated corpora. The volume introduces a
frequency-comparative methodology for identifying and analyzing the
most significant concepts in large literary corpora and demonstrates
its application to some of the most influential poets of the European
tradition.
The book also explores the emerging relationship between traditional
poetic creativity and artificial intelligence by examining and
comparing poems generated by ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and DeepSeek.
Particular attention is devoted to similarities and differences
between the dominant conceptual structures of human poetic language
and those produced by contemporary AI systems.
For the first time, the most frequent concepts in the original
languages of major European poets are systematically presented
together with their frequencies, chronological development, and
interrelationships. The volume will be of interest to scholars and
students in corpus and computational linguistics, comparative
literature, lexicology, semantics, poetics, cultural studies, digital
humanities, and artificial intelligence.
Endorsements:
“Promising approach.”
Noam Chomsky
Professor of Linguistics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
“In this groundbreaking book, Dr. Jakob Margolis bridges the realms of
linguistics, literature, and information technology. This pioneering
work not only offers new insights into the lexical heartbeats of
literary masterpieces spanning millennia but also serves as a valuable
resource for scholars, poets, and AI developers alike. Drawing upon
cutting-edge digital text analysis techniques and revealing the most
frequently used nouns ranked by their occurrence, Margolis introduces
an innovative frequency-based approach that unlocks profound insights
into the core concepts and evolutionary trajectories of poetic
language across cultures, religions, and eras. This masterful
synthesis of quantitative analysis and literary interpretation marks a
significant contribution to the understanding of poetic languages,
promising to refine our appreciation of these seminal texts.”
Mikhail Epstein
Professor of Cultural Theory and Literature, Emory University,
Atlanta, Georgia, USA

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics
                     Ling & Literature




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