The vagaries of poetic inspiration have often been regarded as ineffably mysterious, and have provoked conjectures since antiquity. Instead of invoking the muses, we today are more apt to consider neurophysiological factors. The case of the great English poet John Milton, whose poetic inspiration seemed to follow a marked seasonal pattern, is considered here, and evidence is presented to show c...

This paper is an exploratory sociological analysis of poetic confluence, a spontaneous telepathic phenomenon that occurs in everyday social interaction. In one person’s talk exhibits enigmatic relationship to another’s unstated thoughts or imagery at moment. The analyses draw from empirical approach called Conversation Analysis, formal qualitative method for the naturally occurring interaction ...

Music, unlike ordinary language, can ‘make sense’ or have ‘meaning’ even when it does not refer to anything in particular (other than music). Although we often think of music as a kind of language, on the whole we do not regard it as a ‘translatable’ language, the inherent meaning of which could be sufficiently expressed in a different form. If you strip away the ornaments and metaphors of a po...

Phillis Wheatley, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton… It was when I met you through your poetry, that found out… words can lift off the page… and me. My heart. history. spirit. consciousness… -Revelation! As an African-American woman, poetry is integral to how see, understand, make meaning of world. first teacher, my mother, taught me about world her/our history...

Synopsis The Dekaaz poetic form, similar to haiku with its constrained syllable counts per line, invites a connection between poetry and mathematics. Determining the number of possible Dekaaz variations leads to some interesting counting observations. We discuss two different ways to count the number of possible Dekaaz variations, one using a binary framework and the other approaching the count...

Automatic analysis of poetic rhythm is a challenging task that involves linguistics, literature, and computer science. When the language to be analyzed is known, rule-based systems or data-driven methods can be used. In this paper, we analyze poetic rhythm in English and Spanish. We show that the representations of data learned from character-based neural models are more informative than the on...