"A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" shows many features associated with seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry in general, and with Donne's work in particular. Donne's contemporary, the English writer Izaak Walton, tells us the poem dates from 1611, when Donne, about to travel to France and Germany, wrote for his wife this valediction, or farewell speech. Like most poetry of Donne's time, it ...

This essay considers some problems in philosophical approaches to poetry. Philosophers’ accounts of what poetry is are often ill informed. They tend to select, as essential, features that can also characterize prose works: conspicuous metaphoricity, imagination, fictionality, and so on. This essay considers instead a humbler term: verse. It argues that the constraints on language implied by com...

This paper presents work-in-progress of the POSTDATA project. This project aims to provide means to solve the interoperability issues that exist among the digital poetry repertoires. These repertoires hold data of poetry metrics that is locked in their own databases and it is not freely available to be compared and to be used by intelligent machines that could infer over the data. The POSTDATA ...

Chinese poetry generation is a very challenging task in natural language processing. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stage poetry generating method which first plans the sub-topics of the poem according to the user’s writing intent, and then generates each line of the poem sequentially, using a modified recurrent neural network encoder-decoder framework. The proposed planningbased method ...

Classical Chinese poetry, an important part of Chinese culture, has always been a great task for translators, home and abroad. It is the foreign translators who, in the early 20 century, first translated the classical Chinese poetry into English. The Chinese scholars began to do the translation in the seventies of the 20 century. From the existent translations, foreign or Chinese, we can find t...

The beauty of Tang poetry is expressed in the combination of content and form. If the form is not well reproduced in the process of translation, the integrity of Tang poetry would be impaired to a great extent. By looking at different translations of Tang poetry, it is found that formal reproduction happens where there already exist the similar poetic forms in the target language; such forms as...

Translating across cultures stands for a complicated and demanding process. In his well-known article “Chinese Poetry and the English Reader,” David Hawkes discussed the challenges of translating classical Chinese poetry into English, but he failed to examine a most distinctive feature of Chinese poetry, yi jing 意境. Commonly translated as “poetic world,” yi jing is as much a cultural and philos...

What makes a poem beautiful? We use computational methods to compare the stylistic and content features employed by awardwinning poets and amateur poets. Building upon existing techniques designed to quantitatively analyze style and affect in texts, we examined elements of poetic craft such as diction, sound devices, emotive language, and imagery. Results showed that the most important indicato...