The Hunt for Alliterative Melody

Corey Olsen hypothesized a two-layered structure to a poem by Tolkien, with couplets of iambic tetrameter forming a rhythm section over which a free-form melody of alliteration was superposed. This alliterative structure is not obvious, but perhaps it can be identified quantitatively. This talk describes the development of a statistical method for identifying such free-form melodies in verse and applies it to a variety of twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts. Alliteration in modern English is found to lie along a spectrum. Poems that reproduce strict Old English meter are at one extreme, hip-hop lyrics are at the other. Poems from the modern alliterative revival lie on a continuum of alliterative content.