Science in Poetry and Verse

Large-scale Analysis of Spoken Free-verse Poetry

Most modern and post-modern poems have developed a post-metrical idea of lyrical prosody that employs rhythmical features of everyday language and prose instead of a strict adherence to rhyme and metrical schemes. This development is subsumed under the term free verse prosody. We present our methodology for the large-scale analysis of modern and post-modern poetry in both their written form and...

Behavioral science, engineering, and poetry revisited.

Forty years ago, Lehrman (1971) identified 2 orientations to the study of animal behavior. The natural history orientation conducted field and lab research designed to reveal how animals cope with the circumstances of their natural environment. Such research reveals the diversity among different types of animals and differences between the world of animals and the world of humans (i.e., "poetry...

mulamma’ (macaronic) verse: the link between persian and arabic poetry

â â  “macaronic” literally refers to an attribute for a thing which possesses two colors or two dissimilar qualities, and “macaronic verse”, in arabic rhetoric, points to a kind of poem whose words in one hemstitch or in the whole stitch are composed of words which include dotted letters (mo’jamah) whereas the words in another hemstitch or stitch possess letters with no dots (mohmalah...

Poetry of the Crowd: A Human Computation Algorithm to Convert Prose into Rhyming Verse

Poetry composition is a very complex task that requires a poet to satisfy multiple constraints concurrently. We believe that the task can be augmented by combining the creative abilities of humans with computational algorithms that efficiently constrain and permute available choices. We present a hybrid method for generating poetry from prose that combines crowdsourcing with natural language pr...

Herbert Spiegel, MD 1914-2009: art, science and poetry.