Although literary critics have often made descriptive or evaluative claims about the poetic style of particular authors, or about the formal choices used to create particular effects within a poem, those claims are typically supported by localized textual evidence. Computational analysis can help us examine the patterns of poetic language both within a particular writer’s works and across a larger textual corpus to facilitate comparative studies and a sociological historical poetics. This paper presents a computational approach to measuring four features of Victorian poetic style: rhyme, enjambment, vocabulary richness, and repetition and explores their utility both for comparing the styles of individual authors and for understanding the stylistic conventions that shaped poetic practice in the nineteenth century.
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