Between Distant and Close : Sea and Inland in Tennyson by Topic Modelling

藤田, 郁

大阪大学大学院人文学研究科言語文化学専攻

Alfred Tennyson

There have been many earlier studies on Alfred, Lord Tennyson, a representative poet of nineteenth-century English literature. Despite the fact that quantitative analyses have been used with prose texts, studies of Tennyson and other poets have rarely used such numerical approaches meanwhile they have employed the qualitative approach based on their close reading. This study reads Tennyson’s poems from a distance by using a topic model, a quantitative technique. The analyses are based on the results of the latent Dirichlet allocation topic model (LDA), and examine how the poet depicts his themes by using imagery of the sea and inland environments, the latter including mountains and rivers. In the emerging results of LDA, the sea tends to convey the impressions of despair and eternity (after life) with the image of the broad sea itself, while inland landscapes of mountains connote a religious sense and rivers are used figuratively as life, but not hopelessness or perpetuity. The study’s findings are not necessarily novel, but they do demonstrate how integrating quantitative and qualitative methodologies can be beneficial. Despite these components, neither the author nor the topic modelling stressed that a poem should only have one motif, theme or topic. The researcher ‘reads’ Tennyson’s poems from a distance and up close while weighing the advantages and disadvantages of qualitative and quantitative approaches.