Abstract
This study analyses how popular communication mediums over the past century have changed the form and content of poetry. A periodical and small magazine published in 1912 are assessed and compared, as well as an anthology and several poems from Instagram published in 2014. All poems are also briefly compared to get an understanding of change over time. Medium affordances are considered, especially with respect to multimodal capacities. By assessing vocabulary density, word frequency, word distinctiveness, and visual formatting, characteristics of poetry from specific mediums arise, leading to a conclusion that mediums have an effect on the evolution of poetry.
Highlights
Many scholars and critics do not consider the work published on Instagram to be poetry, and reject it from the canon (Naji, 2018) This study seeks to include Instagram poetry into the canon by assessing the definition of poetry, which has historically eluded scholars, critics, and poets
Instagram poems are included in this study of communication mediums and their affordances in relation to poetry dissemination
American communication mediums across two distinct time periods? a) How do poems in periodicals compare to poems in small magazines that were published in October of 1912? b) How do poems in anthologies compare to poems on Instagram that were published between September and December of 2014? c) How can quantitative data of poetry content and qualitative data of poetry structure indicate these differentiations? This research question is fundamentally interested in how a communication medium might influence popular poetry, both in subject matter and in structure, and both synchronically and diachronically
Summary
The linguistic study of poetry is not new; researchers have created many corpuses of poetic text from the twentieth century and prior. Many scholars and critics do not consider the work published on Instagram to be poetry, and reject it from the canon (Naji, 2018) This study seeks to include Instagram poetry into the canon by assessing the definition of poetry, which has historically eluded scholars, critics, and poets. Instagram has been able to revive poetry and make it relevant to a new generation through accessibility of language and digital reach (Pâquet, 2019) For these reasons, Instagram poems are included in this study of communication mediums and their affordances in relation to poetry dissemination
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