The simplest shapesOccasionally I wonder how valuable computerized analysis of works of literature will ever be. To reassure me that I’m not wasting my time, Jan Christoph Meister tells me1 what Johann Wolfgang von Goethe thought:

Goethe discusses the pros and cons of morphology as a science, and eventually concludes: “Its arrangement of phenomena calls upon activities of the mind so in harmony with human nature, and so pleasant, that even failures may prove both useful and charming.”

The citation is to a translation of Goethe’s collected works. 2 If we want the old man to be saying something about the study of literature, we’re making an analogy, because Goethe is talking about morphology as an essential predecessor to what we now call “biology” (because he was right). Literally, he’s talking about the study of form without regard to function, which is all my programs can do with poetry. I like even better the sentences just before Meister’s quotation.

The advantages of morphology are that it is made up of widely recognized elements, it does not conflict with any theory, it does not need to displace something else to make room for itself, and it deals with extremely significant phenomena.

That sounds like a feasible goal for a small project like mine. This connection across 220 years shows that once again it’s useful to be, as the philosopher Adam Ant phrased it, “an eighteenth-century brain, in a twenty-first-century head.”

Notes

  1. Meister, Jan Christoph. “Poetry, Phenomenon and Phenomenology.” Computational Stylistics in Poetry, Prose, and Drama, edited by Anne-Sophie Bories et al., De Gruyter, 2022, pp. 37–66.
  2. Goethe, JW. The Collected Works, vol. 12: Scientific Studies, ed. and transl. by Miller D. New York: Suhrkamp, 1988.