Distinguishing Voices in The Waste Land using Computational Stylistics

Julian Brooke,Graeme Hirst,Adam Hammond

doi:10.33011/lilt.v12i.1375

Abstract

T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land is a notoriously challenging example of modernist poetry, mixing the independent viewpoints of over ten distinct characters without any clear demarcation of which voice is speaking when. In this work, we apply unsupervised techniques in computational stylistics to distinguish the particular styles of these voices, offering a computer’s perspective on longstanding debates in literary analysis. Our work includes a model for stylistic segmentation that looks for points of maximum stylistic variation, a k-means clustering model for detecting non-contiguous speech from the same voice, and a stylistic profiling approach which makes use of lexical resources built from a much larger collection of literary texts. Evaluating using an expert interpretation, we show clear progress in distinguishing the voices of The Waste Land as compared to appropriate baselines, and we also offer quantitative evidence both for and against that particular interpretation.

Highlights

Most work in automated stylistic analysis operates at the level of a text, assuming that a text is stylistically homogeneous
The goal of the present work is to investigate whether computational stylistic analysis can distinguish these voices in ways that correspond to human interpretations, and to explore whether our analysis can inform human interpretation, i.e., contribute to literary analysis
The automatic segmentation is consistently better than the evenly-spaced baseline, but Initial Even Initial Automatic Initial gold standard (Gold) random clustering (Random) Even Random Automatic Random Gold k-means Even k-means Automatic k-means Gold k-means Gold Seeded

Summary

Introduction

Most work in automated stylistic analysis operates at the level of a text, assuming that a text is stylistically homogeneous. He studied literature and philosophy at Harvard and Oxford before settling in London He published his first poem, “The Love Song of J. In the years that followed, he published several volumes of poetry, worked as a literary critic as well as a banker, founded the influential literary periodical The Criterion, and turned increasingly toward playwriting, winning a Tony Award in 1950. Though he worked in many forms, he is best remembered today for his early poetry, of which The Waste Land (1922) is his most important single work

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