Metre and Semantics in the Poetry of Czech Post-Symbolists Accessed via LDA Topic Modelling

Abstract

The article deals with the relationship between semantics and poetic meter in the works of Czech post-symbolist poets and their predecessors. We access the phenomena by means of a machine-driven meter recognition on one hand and LDA topic modelling on the other. We first show how the poetic groups differ in their general preferences for particular topics. Next we analyze the topic distributions in two dominant metres (i.e. iamb and trochee) across the poetic groups.