Implications of vocabulary density for poetry: Reading T. S. Eliot’s poetry through computational methods

Abstract

Abstract By incorporating computational methods into reading literary texts, this study examines the literary implications of the ‘vocabulary density’ and frequency of nouns and adjectives in T. S. Eliot’s poetry. This study analyzes 4,689,655 words from forty-seven poets available on Project Gutenberg, a catalog spanning from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. The data illustrate both the continuity and discontinuity found in English and American poetry dependent on conventional divisions between literary movements: eighteenth century, Romanticism, Imagism, and Modernism. The findings shed light on the similarities and differences between Eliot’s poetry and others’, particularly in terms of Franco Moretti’s concept of ‘modern epic’ and his methodology of ‘distant reading’. Through this combined quantitative and qualitative research, this article ultimately upholds the notion that the linguistic distinction of Eliot’s high modernist poetry lies, by and large, in his use of invented and equivocal words that reflects and represents an artistic response to modern human, cultural, social conditions, and experiment with poetic diction and polyphonic voice in the early twentieth century.