Abstract

Scholars have repeatedly contrasted the 1805 and 1850 versions of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude since the discovery and publication of the former by Ernest De Sélincourt in 1926. Points of contention have included the 1850 poem’s grammatical revisions and shifts toward greater political and religious orthodoxy. While these discussions have waned in recent decades, digital humanities tools allow us to revisit oft-debated texts through new lenses. Wanting to examine scholarly claims about The Prelude from a digital humanities perspective, I collaborated with Dr. Billy Hall to enter both versions of the poem into a data analysis and visualization tool, which displayed the results in topic-modeling outputs and most-frequent-words lists. The 1805 and 1850 topic modeling outputs were essentially identical to one another, suggesting either that scholars have overstated differences between the versions or that the themes of the poem may have evolved in ways not easily captured by my digital humanities methods. On the other hand, the most-frequent-words lists revealed some notable discrepancies between the two Preludes. One set of lists included articles, conjunctions, pronouns, and linking verbs (otherwise known as “stop words”), demonstrating, for instance, that the word “was” appeared with significantly less frequency in the 1850 Prelude. I found that other linking verbs also decreased in the 1850 Prelude, and this discovery prompted me to conduct a stylistic analysis of said verbs. Knowing that a raw statistical count of linking verbs in both texts would reveal only an incomplete portrait of Wordsworth’s shifting verb usage, I divided the verb revisions into two primary categories: replacements of linking verbs with dynamic verbs and descriptors, and removals of lines containing linking verbs. While scholars have previously highlighted the replacement of linking verbs with dynamic verbs and descriptors in the 1850 Prelude, these revisions only account for 30% of the 1850 linking verb revisions. In fact, the majority of linking verb revisions consist of removed 1805 lines. Many of these lines are declarative statements—the removal of which suggests that Wordsworth preferred, in some cases, a less prescriptive approach in the 1850 Prelude.

Degree

MA

College and Department

Humanities; English

Rights

https://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/

Date Submitted

2023-04-25

Document Type

Thesis

Handle

http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/etd12730

Keywords

digital humanities, Wordsworth, topic modeling, word lists, The Prelude, revision, linking verbs, dynamic verbs, literary history

Language

english

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