Within written media, poetry is often regarded as enigmatic, frivolous, or too niche. As a result, poems (even by established poets) are often overlooked by larger publishers and literature-focused websites alike. (The anti-capitalist nature of poetry may play a role here as well). There are services for rating and recommending entire books (including poetry collections, to be fair) like GoodReads, Amazon, or Bookish, but to my knowledge, there aren’t any sites or services that recommend poems on an individual level.

With this in mind, I wondered how poem recommendation may even work. One often finds a genre or two that they like and searches that out, but there must be elements of poetry that transcend genre. If there are, machine learning seems like a perfect tool to use to find them. In this article, I’ll explore some features of poetry that make it unique as a style of writing and investigate differences between four umbrella genres I’ll be referring to as “movements”. After building a model, I can create a recommendation system that recommends poetry based on a word, multiple words, or another poem.

#data-science #machine-learning #poetry #feature-engineering #nlp