My initial vision for my Voyant research and what I ended up with are fairly different. My original goal was to compare a corpus of Eliot's earlier poems with a later collection and then, separately, to do the same for Pound. Individually, I wanted to see how the token and type percentages changed over time for each author. The hypothesis driving this interest was that Eliot's token and type count would increase over time and that Pound's would decrease. Also, Eliot would begin using more words associated with time, history, and legacy, while Pound would either lose those words or begin relying more heavily on physical objects. I made this assumption based on the shift in their literary and ideological influences: while Eliot adopted a more-British identity and poetic structure, Pound distanced himself from any cultural group, until he joined fascist supporters.
However, Gutenburg only had selections from both poets' earlier works. I decided to compare the broadest collection from each and see what was revealed from their 1920s-era poetry (works that they more than likely edited together).
The overall data revealed two particularly interesting results:
1.) That despite Pound's earlier collection being twice as long (by word count) as Eliot's, Eliot nearly matched him in every category.
2.) By the trends and frequencies of their works, Eliot is more consistent with his word choice than Pound.
And true to my original hypothesis (although I would not count this as solid evidence until I can view it across more of their works), Eliot focuses more on the word “time” and the word “like” (perhaps a connection to his Victorian influences?). Pound is far less consistent, occasionally peaking with “old” and “day.” I had assumed that Pound would hone in on physical objects or descriptors, and this–at least for now–seems to reflect that. But I would like to pursue this project further to see if there are trends that I had not considered, if my hypothesis is right, or if looking at these two Modernists at a distance has something else to teach me.