How does it determine where are the stresses? Is it based on just the word itself?
I'm very new to English poetry, I might be entirely wrong here. But when I input some famous poems, the way this app puts stresses is quite a bit different from my understanding.
For instance, for
> Bards of Passion and of Mirth,
It sees _and_ as unstressed, the second _of_ as stressed, and _Mirth_ as unstressed, which doesn't quite make sense to me to be honest.
> Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
It sees both _and_ as unstressed, while my understanding is that this verse is better read as fully iambic, putting stresses on both _and_.
> And what is love? It is a doll dress'd up / For idleness to cosset, nurse and dandle
Thanks for the thoughtful feedback and questions! The meter detection algorithm is by far the most complex piece of this code, and you're right that it still sometimes generates unintuitive results. I'm always looking for more examples to add to my test suite to make improvements, so I really appreciate you sharing what you tried.
It tends to behave poorly when there's a word it doesn't recognize (like "doll'd"—I hope to add support for more of these poetic spellings just as I added support for spelling words like "dancing" as "dancin'"), so that might be partly at play with some of what you're seeing. But I think there's also something else going on here—it previously didn't ever generate so many consecutive syllables with the same stress, so I probably introduced a regression at some point. I'll investigate and add more tests for that too!
Lastly, a byproduct of my own background and the corpuses I use is that this does work better with "modern" poetry. For example, Shakespeare's Sonnet 29 starts with this line:
> When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes
In the intended iambic pentameter, it would be:
> when, IN disGRACE with FORtune AND men's EYES
I don't know enough history to know if people ever spoke English like that, but that interpretation is way off to a modern reader. If I didn't know it was supposed to be iambic and was trying to diagram the stresses, I'd do something like:
I'm very new to English poetry, I might be entirely wrong here. But when I input some famous poems, the way this app puts stresses is quite a bit different from my understanding.
For instance, for
> Bards of Passion and of Mirth,
It sees _and_ as unstressed, the second _of_ as stressed, and _Mirth_ as unstressed, which doesn't quite make sense to me to be honest.
> Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
It sees both _and_ as unstressed, while my understanding is that this verse is better read as fully iambic, putting stresses on both _and_.
> And what is love? It is a doll dress'd up / For idleness to cosset, nurse and dandle
https://i.imgur.com/raPMDnc.png
It sees four consecutive unstressed syllables. I'm not sure what is the logic here.