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I've been reading a lot of poetry on Project Gutenberg, and much of it comes to me without context regarding the author. I sometimes find myself wondering about their lives and the spinning stories from those wonderings. I've started looking at Wikipedia for some of the poets, but many of them don't have articles there or have articles that aren't very informative.
I sort of have a feeling that there's a mathematical formula for figuring out how likely a given 19th century or early 20th century poet is to have a detailed Wikipedia article. There's a plus for popularity and a plus for still being thought a good poet. There are modifiers for class and race and religion. Being some level of scandalous ups the probability, too.
I have confirmed, repeatedly, that I'm not able to force myself to read poems written in phonetic dialect or with more than a certain density of non-standard spelling (about one word a line for most things). I just read half of a book of English and Scottish ballads. That is, I went from beginning to end, but I skipped over certain ballads as too difficult and really not worth my effort.
I sort of have a feeling that there's a mathematical formula for figuring out how likely a given 19th century or early 20th century poet is to have a detailed Wikipedia article. There's a plus for popularity and a plus for still being thought a good poet. There are modifiers for class and race and religion. Being some level of scandalous ups the probability, too.
I have confirmed, repeatedly, that I'm not able to force myself to read poems written in phonetic dialect or with more than a certain density of non-standard spelling (about one word a line for most things). I just read half of a book of English and Scottish ballads. That is, I went from beginning to end, but I skipped over certain ballads as too difficult and really not worth my effort.
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