Crossing linguistic frontiers: a digital comparative analysis of Eliot’s and Machado’s poetic evolution

Abstract This study presents a cross-linguistic digital comparative analysis of T. S. Eliot and Antonio Machado, two seminal modernist poets whose works embody divergent yet parallel responses to the crises of early twentieth-century modernity. While Eliot has long been situated at the center of Anglophone modernism, Machado has often been confined to Spanish literary historiography. Integrating lexical profiling, latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling, principal components analysis (PCA), and cluster analysis, this research quantitatively traces the thematic concerns and stylistic evolutions across their complete poetic corpora. The lexical and grammatical analyses show that Machado’s language is anchored in the tangible world, characterized by an elemental vocabulary of nature and a high frequency of descriptive adjectives. In contrast, Eliot’s lexicon privileges abstract concepts, cognitive verbs, and adjectives of sterility and decay, which reflect his preoccupation with alienation and fragmentation. The subsequent stage of analysis—which involves LDA topic modeling, PCA, and cluster analysis—elucidates their broader thematic and stylistic trajectories. Machado’s evolution was shaped by external historical and geographical realities, moving from early introspection to an engagement with the Spanish landscape and culminating in a confrontation with the Civil War. Eliot’s development, however, was propelled by an internal turning point—his 1927 conversion to Anglicanism—which redirected his poetry toward theological and philosophical inquiry. By positioning Machado within the broader framework of international modernism, this study offers new insights into the transnational dimensions of modernism and opens pathways for future cross-linguistic digital research.