Pops and Flops: Some Properties of Famous English Poems

Abstract

This article describes a preliminary study of linguistic attributes that differentiate popular from obscure poems in English. Following in the footsteps of Simonton (1989), Martindale (1990) and others, frequency of appearance in anthologies was used as an index of poetic popularity. Twenty general anthologies published between 1966 and 1997 were selected and all poems appearing in more than five of them were taken as a reference sample. This gave eighty-five poems by fifty-four different authors. (The two most popular were Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach with 16 occurrences and Kubla Khan by Samuel T. Coleridge with 15.)

As a control group, fifty-four other poets were selected by finding a less eminent poet of the same sex born within ten years of each poet in the reference sample. The same number of poems were chosen (as near as possible randomly) from each obscure poet as from the matching popular poet. This gave eighty-five obscure poems, also by fifty-four different authors. As a check on this dichotomy, the number of quotations from each of these authors in the Little Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (Ratcliffe, 1994) was tallied. For the popular poets the median was seven entries, for the obscure poets the median was zero. This difference is highly significant.

Some aspects of the language of the two subsets were then examined. Although the popular poems were on average longer than the obscure ones (median length 155 and 127 words respectively), this difference was not statistically significant. However, a number of significant differences were found: 1) the popular poems had significantly fewer syllables per word in their first lines; 2) popular poems were more likely to begin with an initial line composed entirely of monosyllables; 3) the mean number of letters per word in the popular poem was very significantly less (4.13 versus 4.29) than the obscure poems; and 4) the vocabulary of the popular poems was on average less rich than that of the obscure ones. Syntactic differences were also investigated. Overall a clear tendency for famous poems to use simpler language than obscure poems was found. In poetry, simplicity would seem to be a virtue.

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