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Poetry reading is a topic about which there is always something more that can usefully be said. This book explores key aspects of poetry by discussing poems which are quoted in full and then treated in a sustained way. It considers a broad range of poetry, using examples taken from the Tudor period to the twenty-first century. Some are very traditional, and some are very avant-garde, and most are somewhere in between, so it is unusually broad and eclectic in its generic range. The book invites readers to cultivate generic generosity, and entertain a willingness to be astonished by the bizarre practices poets sometimes indulge in, in the privacy of their garrets, and among consenting adults. The emphasis is on meanings rather than words, looking beyond technical devices like alliteration and assonance so that poems are understood as dynamic structures creating specific ends and effects. The three sections cover progressively expanding areas. The first deals with such basics as imagery, diction and metre; the second concerns broader matters, such as poetry and context, and the reading of sequences of poems. The third section looks at 'theorised' readings and the 'textual genesis' of poems from manuscript to print. By adopting a smallish personal 'stable' of writers whose work is followed in this long-term way, a poetry reader can develop the kind of intimacy with authors that brings a sense of confidence and purpose.

The availability of appropriate research corpora is a fundamental concern in music information retrieval research. This paper addresses the design, development, and evaluation of a poetic corpus, POMET, for the meter estimation task. Poems, which communicate through rhythm and apparent meaning, have a vital role in many literary traditions. Metrical rhythm generally involves periodic arrangements of sequences of stressed and unstressed syllables in each line of poems. It has already been proved that poetry’s aesthetic and emotional perception can be studied well using poetic meter analysis. A corpus with eight meters is designed and recorded in a studio environment for Malayalam, one of the prominent languages in South India. Using deep neural network architectures, a pilot evaluation is performed with musical texture features and spectrograms. We hope that the corpus can be used as a benchmark dataset for poetic meter estimation, rhythmic analysis, and corpus-based prosody analysis.

This review of new formalism poses challenges very different from those of the familiar compendium-review genre (e.g., “The Year's Work in Victorian Studies”). While all review essays face questions of inclusion, in an assignment of this kind, where the defining category is neither an established period nor topic but a developing theory or method emerging from the entire repertoire of literary and cultural studies, identifying the scholarly literature is a critical task in its own right. Moreover, because new formalism is better described as a movement than a theory or method, the work of selection is especially vexed and consequential. It is vexed because the practitioners' modes and degrees of identification with the movement are so various, and consequential because the reviewer's bibliographic decisions cannot help but construct the phenomenon being described.

While some accounts of syllable weight deny a role for onsets, onset-sensitive weight criteria have received renewed attention in recent years (e.g. Gordon 2005, Topintzi 2010). This article presents new evidence supporting onsets as factors in weight. First, in complex stress systems such as those of English and Russian, onset length is a significant attractor of stress both in the lexicon and in nonce probes. This effect is highly systematic and unlikely, it is argued, to be driven by analogy alone. Second, in flexible quantitative meters (e.g. in Sanskrit), poets preferentially align longer onsets with heavier metrical positions, all else being equal. A theory of syllable weight is proposed in which the domain of weight begins not with the rime but with the p-center (perceptual center) of the syllable, which is perturbed by properties of the onset. While onset effects are apparently universal in gradient weight systems, they are weak enough to be usually eclipsed by the structure of the rime under categorization. This proposal therefore motivates both the existence of onset weight effects and the subordination of the onset to the rime with respect to weight.

On the example of some texts attributed to the 15th-century poet-saint Kabīr, the paper contests the postmodern claim that each received version is a poetically beautiful, polished text. In all probability all received versions have undergone a long phase of oral transmission before being committed to writing and they are sometimes the outcome of textual corruption resulting in inconsistent reading or in poetic looseness and redundancy. On the basis of prosody and a comparison of variant versions, reconstruction of some earlier text is possible. It is argued that the poems may have been composed for a metrically correct recitation and when they became songs set to musical moods and rhythms they have lost their strict metrical frame under the licenses used by the singers. Amplification can also be detected on a higher level since sometimes entire lines were invented or borrowed. By detecting instances of amplification a more concise and more powerful early text can be reconstructed. The reconstruction of the early text in turn can open up a way to posit the later variants into a relationship with each other and to see ideological motivating forces behind changes such as ‘bhaktification’.