A connectionist model of poetic meter

Abstract Traditional analyses have not explored fully the interaction of various elements which affect stress patterns of a line of poetry in performance. A connectionist model of James McClelland and David Rumelhart in Explorations in Parallel Distributed Processing (1988) is applied to the analysis of English poetic meter. The model graphically illustrates the dynamics of a reading of a poetic line and incorporates a number of features associated with the performance of a poetic text, while providing a notational system that allows mathematical analyses of poetic meter as it is realized in performance.