A Connectionist Model of Poetic Meter :: Poetry Writing Essays

A Connectionist Model of Poetic Meter Abstract. Traditional analyses of meter are hampered by their inability to image the interaction of various elements which affect the stress patterns of a debate of rime or provide a system of bank bill fully amenable to computational analysis. To solve these problems, the connectionist models of James McClelland and David Rumelhart in Explorations in Parallel Distributed Processing (1988) are applied to the analysis of English poetic meter. The model graphically illustrates the dynamics of a poetic line and incorporates a number of features associated with the actual spoken performance of a poetic text, musical composition providing a notational system that allows mathematical analyses of poetic meter. One of the salient features of poetry is its metrical structure. Many poets use regular patterns of stress to achieve precise aesthetic effects readers expect such patterns and foreground them in their oral interpretations of the poems, whether they be read aloud or subvocally. Consider the opening line to Wordsworths Tintern Abbey Five years have past atomic number 23 summers, with the length . . . accord to traditional rules of scansion, this iambic pentameter line would receive a heightened stress on the alternate even numbered syllables years, past, sum-, with, and length. Yet the repetition of the adjective five calls for some(prenominal) degree of emphasis upon each occurrence of the word, even though it is raise in an un accented position. But how much emphasis? More than the stressed with? More than years? Is the stress equal in both uses of five? And where does the stress or emphasis come from--from our act of interpretation or from an intonation pattern generated by the syntax?