Search

This paper proposes a new approach to reading the 'Confessional Poetry' of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton by combining quantitative text analysis methods with a qualitative literary interpretation. We investigate the meanings of stylistic differences between Plath's and Sexton's poems and highlight their differences in using pronouns and related sentiment words. Our data-focused research demonstrates that Plath employs rather fragmented and schizophrenic styles, as well as poetic voices with word choices that present dynamic and volatile emotions. On the other hand, Sexton's poetic voice is causal, homogeneous, and relatively stable, focusing a lot on domestic issues and the symbolic function of father. To illustrate this, three computational methods are used: (1) linking pronoun uses in each poet's work to sentiment words (Figs 1 and 2), (2) a topic-model analysis to compare Plath's and Sexton's works to see how the themes of poetry are manifested by the different patterns of word use, the so-called topics, and their co-occurrences in the poems (Figs 3 and 4), and (3) a diachronic analysis of each poet's works (using the topic model) to identify the thematic changes (Figs 5 and 6). The methods commonly testify one of the widely accepted ideas regarding Plath's and Sexton's confessional poems. Plath often breaks with the boundary of the ego, I , through complex reciprocity between I and other pronoun groups, while Sexton evokes the presence of the poet through more stable and less kinetic voices of the authorial I. Plath's and Sexton's works have long been regarded as the passive products of biological reductionism due to the traditional way of understanding the confessional genre. The aim of this paper, however, is to redefine the meaning of confessional genre, proposing that the truthfulness of the poetic voice I cannot be separated from the stylistic issues in poetic language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• An image-based Chinese poetry generation network. • Poetry theme and style control module aims to meet the theme and style requirements of poem. • Constructed a theme-based Chinese classical poetry dataset. The automatic generation of poems from images is a classic task in natural language processing. Recently, it has gained tremendous research interest due to the help of neural sequence-to-sequence networks. The current methods are not qualified to generate poems under the joint control of the theme and style conditions, while these two key factors are critical to the quality of Chinese poetry. This paper proposes an image-based Chinese poem generation network (ICPGN), which can obtain the holistic content and sentiments in images and transform them into theme and style representations. A poem theme and style control module (PTSC) is designed to ensure that the generated poems meet the theme and style requirements simultaneously. A new dataset CQC2020 is constructed for training and testing of the proposed network and other related methods. Extensive manual and machine experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness and competitiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reconsiders the poetry of Okot p'Bitek in light of both his formal legal education and the principles of traditional Acholi law. Okot claims in Artist, the Ruler that traditional African poets actually create and proclaim law at a fundamental level in society. Okot himself, as a poet in the "traditional" mode, can thus be understood as performing a similar function, particularly in his poems Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol, which can be read in terms of the reconciliatory procedures of traditional justice and, jointly, as an expression of the contemporary value (and possible complications) of traditional law as a response to the legal norms inherited from the British colonial legal system. Given recent debates about the efficacy ot traditional justice in promoting reconciliation in Northern Uganda, a "legal" reading of Okot's poetry demonstrates the continuing relevance of his perspectives with regard to traditional art and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper treats a topos found in Greek poetry from the archaic to the Hellenistic period, involving a confrontation between antagonistic and contrasting species of birds. Tracing the continuities and distinctions among the uses of the conceit in Hesiod, Pindar, and Callimachus, I argue that on each occasion it serves poets as a means of articulating their literary personae and the ethical, stylistic, and generic choices shaping their compositions. Not just a means of poetic polemic, self-definition, and self-positioning, the avian terms used within the conceit also come to figure in the literary critical vocabulary of the late fifth century and its redeployment in Hellenistic times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on "Sir Orfeo," a fourteenth-century anonymous poem that tells the story of Orfeo and his wife Heurodis. According to the author, the key to interpreting the poem is centered around the body of Heurodis. The author discusses the significance of Heurodis' self-mutilation, the connection between Heurodis and Orfeo's kingdom, and Heurodis' abduction.

In this essay the author focuses on the spirituality of poet Walt Whitman as seen in his poetry collection "Leaves of Grass." The author asserts that Whitman's spiritual message develops throughout the different editions of "Leaves of Grass," and that readers must approach Whitman's poetry as a whole in order to appreciate this message. The author analyzes themes in several of Whitman's poems.