Thursday 11 March 2010

A Word Cloud of The Four Quartets


I wish they'd had word clouds back when I was at university sniffing dictionaries. For those of you innocent and ignorant of such things, the more times a word appears in the original text the bigger it is in the cloud. Here, for example, is Eliot's Four Quartets.


You can make your own at Wordle, although I should warn you that some are decidedly less interesting than others. The full text of Four Quartets can be found here. And a final oddness: there is on British television a programme that I have never watched called Wire In The Blood. I've no idea what it's about, but as the title is a quotation from Four Quartets -

Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.

- I assume that the programme is mostly about TIME.

The actual rose garden at Burnt Norton, where you can apparently now get married.

Oh, and "Human kind/Cannot bear very much reality" is the 32nd most quoted line of poetry.

1 comment:

  1. Making word clouds out of certain types of poetry is my third most favourite thing.

    For instance, a poet recently lauded in The Guardian was praised for her unusual use of language.

    Word clouds of her last two books (three including this latest) show that her 'unusual' language focuses almost entirely on breath/breathing, eyes, dark, light and soft.

    As do most poets.

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