Augmenting Poetry Composition with Verse by Verse

We describe Verse by Verse, our experiment in augmenting the creative process of writing poetry with an AI. We have created a group of AI poets, styled after various American classic poets, that are able to offer as suggestions generated lines of verse while a user is composing a poem. In this paper, we describe the underlying system to offer these suggestions. This includes a generative model, which is tasked with generating a large corpus of lines of verse offline and which are then stored in an index, and a dual-encoder model that is tasked with recommending the next possible set of verses from our index given the previous line of verse

An Anthology of British Neo-Latin Literature

This volume offers a wide range of sample passages from literature written in Latin in the British Isles during the period from about 1500 to 1800

Ecopoetic ruminations in Baudelaire’s ‘Je n’ai pas oublié’ and ‘La Servante au grand cœur’

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis via http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2014.993676‘Je n’ai pas oublié’, the ninety-ninth poem in the second edition of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (1861), involves the narrator reminiscing about his impoverished childhood in his mother’s small house near Paris. In the following piece, ‘La Servante au grand cœur’, the narrator suggests to his mother that they should take flowers to the tomb of his nursemaid, whose nigh forgotten body lies beside other neglected corpses suffering the passage of the seasons. These two vignettes of memory highlight a burgeoning awareness of new prosodic and ecological systems, making them ripe for ecopoetic analysis. This article suggests that the evocation of Baudelaire’s modest pre-metropolitan existence offers the key to understanding the diminished human and non-human presences that figure in the surrounding 16 poems of the ‘Tableaux parisiens’ series, marked by the melancholic metrocentrism that suffuses Baudelaire’s later poetry

Linguistically-Informed Neural Architectures for Lexical, Syntactic and Semantic Tasks in Sanskrit

The primary focus of this thesis is to make Sanskrit manuscripts more accessible to the end-users through natural language technologies. The morphological richness, compounding, free word orderliness, and low-resource nature of Sanskrit pose significant challenges for developing deep learning solutions. We identify four fundamental tasks, which are crucial for developing a robust NLP technology for Sanskrit: word segmentation, dependency parsing, compound type identification, and poetry analysis. The first task, Sanskrit Word Segmentation (SWS), is a fundamental text processing task for any other downstream applications. However, it is challenging due to the sandhi phenomenon that modifies characters at word boundaries. Similarly, the existing dependency parsing approaches struggle with morphologically rich and low-resource languages like Sanskrit. Compound type identification is also challenging for Sanskrit due to the context-sensitive semantic relation between components. All these challenges result in sub-optimal performance in NLP applications like question answering and machine translation. Finally, Sanskrit poetry has not been extensively studied in computational linguistics. While addressing these challenges, this thesis makes various contributions: (1) The thesis proposes linguistically-informed neural architectures for these tasks. (2) We showcase the interpretability and multilingual extension of the proposed systems. (3) Our proposed systems report state-of-the-art performance. (4) Finally, we present a neural toolkit named SanskritShala, a web-based application that provides real-time analysis of input for various NLP tasks. Overall, this thesis contributes to making Sanskrit manuscripts more accessible by developing robust NLP technology and releasing various resources, datasets, and web-based toolkit.Comment: Ph.D. dissertatio

“Almost Unknown to the General Reader”: Biographical and Conceptual Contexts of Melville’s Marginalia in Thomas Warton’s \u3cem\u3eThe History of English Poetry\u3c/em\u3e

Herman Melville’s copy of Thomas Warton’s The History of English Poetry (1871) both epitomises the fate of Melville’s dispersed library and illustrates the challenges and importance of his reading and marginalia to research on his life and writings. This 1032-page volume left Melville’s library following his death in 1891; it was discovered in the 1930s, subsequently lost, and rediscovered in 1999. Twice rebound and missing its original endpapers, the extremely brittle volume has now been digitised at Melville’s Marginalia Online. Melville’s markings and annotations reveal his preoccupation with Warton’s attention to subjects “almost unknown to the general reader”: lost works, the dispersals of libraries, works rescued from oblivion, languages and writings concealed by ecclesiastical dictates, banned writings, and esoteric modes of literary expression—all topics with deep aesthetic and biographical connections to Melville’s own writings and to his failed career as a popular author. The book contains marginalia on writers Melville had studied in still-surviving volumes, on now-forgotten writers, excerpted by Warton, and on writers by whom no Melville copies are known to survive. Dating from the period of Melville’s reputational decline, his marginalia offers an unparalleled look into an obscure but artistically fertile period of his life and thought

Parallelism in Romans

This thesis concerns a study of the epistle to the Romans in light of the ancient Jewish poetical trait of parallelism. The intent is to show the influence of this poetical trait in Paula’s most systematic prose writing. No consideration of theological issues is taken up, for the study is conducted on a strict literary basis. Examples of parallelism are quoted from the American Standard Version and are written in such a way as to show the coextension of ideas. In the eighteenth century, Bishop Lowth finally saw through the strict prose printing of the 1611 King James Version of the Bible. This discovery is discussed as it pertains to the intent of the thesis. His lectures of Hebrew poetry are indeed epochmaking and have an important place in any consideration of Hebrew parallelism. John Forbes, who recognized the presence of parallelism in New Testament writers is also given a great deal of consideration. The entire epistle to the Romans has not been exhausted. Dispersed examples of parallelisms from the various chapters are called to the reader’s attention and commented on. The fourth chapter of Romans is treated in great detail to show that the Hebrew influence on Paul was pronounced enough to make parallelism the characteristic trait of this letter. Any of the sixteen chapters could have been used to illustrate the same point. Types of parallelism are unfamiliar to most students of literature, therefore great care is devoted to an explanation of synonymous, synthetic and antithetic parallelism. These three major types are often used in a specific form called “inversion”. Paula’s use of inverted parallelism is profuse and an extended explanation utilizing examples from both the Old and New Testament is given. The metaphoric element of the Hebrew language is important is understanding their use of parallelism. This element is discussed in relation to the correspondence of ideas. To simplify understanding and explanation of the various strophes, tristich (three clauses), tetrastichs (four clauses), pentastich (five clauses), and hexastich (six clauses) are used to define certain parts of long passages. For instance, eleven lines may be quoted from the Old Testament; the explanation of these lines may be quoted from the Old Testament; the explanation of these lines may first of all involve the first pentastich (the first five lines) and later, the concluding hexastich (six lines). The reader will notice the strong element of antithetical parallelism. Often, diatribes are the mode used to express antithetical ideas; at other times, Paul will begin a long discourse and write strophe after strophe of antithesis. Certainly, Paul can be understood, admired and enjoyed to a greater degree, if one is familiar with this very definite characteristic of his writings: that of parallelism

Parallelism in Romans

This work concerns a study of the epistle to the Romans in light of the ancient Jewish poetical trait of parallelism. The intent is to show the influence of the poetical trait in Paul\u27s most systematic prose writing.https://scholars.fhsu.edu/fort_hays_studies_series/1025/thumbnail.jp