New and interesting algorithmic tool that evaluates and scores the quality of contemporary poems developed by Michael Dalvean. Better than the Pritchard Scale, to be sure. His write-up on the research is here (PDF).
The upshot of identifying the characteristics of high quality poems is that we can then come up with a means of placing poems on a continuum according to how much a poem exemplifies the characteristics of an amateur poem or, at the other extreme, a professional poem. We can then use this continuum to rank professional poems and, in doing so, we can make some objective statements about which poems are “better”. There is a tradition of considering some poets as “minor” and others as “major” (Eliot, 1946). Placing poems on a continuum that is based on the extent to which poems possess the craftsmanship of a professional may be a step towards explaining why some poets are “greater” than others. Thus, an important element of this paper is the creation of such a continuum using a corpus of contemporary American poets.