Why study history of (poetic) forms: computational & transnational approaches to art

Poetry is often understood as a form of individual expression, shaped by a personal relationship to language and the world. Yet it is also built upon technologies—meter, rhyme, stanza—that can persist for centuries. In this talk, I examine poetry through these technologies to sketch approaches to comparative and transnational history of the genre. Drawing on the large-scale multilingual poetry collection PoeTree and computational text analysis, I explore the relationship between form and meaning, its historical consequences, and how it can explain transnational trends and shifts, including the most dramatic one: the global decline of form during the 20th century.