Computing the Sound–Sense Harmony: A Case Study of William Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Francis Webb’s Most Popular Poems

Abstract

Poetic devices implicitly work towards inducing the reader to associate intended and expressed meaning to the sounds of the poem. In turn, sounds may be organized a priori into categories and assigned presumed meaning as suggested by traditional literary studies. To compute the degree of harmony and disharmony, I have automatically extracted the sound grids of all the sonnets by William Shakespeare and have combined them with the themes expressed by their contents. In a first experiment, sounds have been associated with lexically and semantically based sentiment analysis, obtaining an 80% of agreement. In a second experiment, sentiment analysis has been substituted by Appraisal Theory, thus obtaining a more fine-grained interpretation that combines dis-harmony with irony. The computation for Francis Webb is based on his most popular 100 poems and combines automatic semantically and lexically based sentiment analysis with sound grids. The results produce visual maps that clearly separate poems into three clusters: negative harmony, positive harmony and disharmony, where the latter instantiates the need by the poet to encompass the opposites in a desperate attempt to reconcile them. Shakespeare and Webb have been chosen to prove the applicability of the method proposed in general contexts of poetry, exhibiting the widest possible gap at all linguistic and poetic levels.