Characterizing the evolution of English poetry using language networks

Abstract

The structure of literary works, like many real world systems, change through time. In this work, we investigate this evolution by constructing word networks for English poems from different eras. Parameters calculated from the constructed networks differentiate Augustan poems from poems of other eras. This agrees with the analysis of an expert on poetic eras where the Augustan period is isolated as the time for predicative poems and the other periods are mostly represented by adjectival poetry. We have shown then that word networks reflect the structure of written texts.