Can literature, like humanity, make use of such a shorthand?
Tuesday, March 01, 2016
Data Artist Proves Just How Unique Shakespeare's 154 Sonnets Really Are
Can literature, like humanity, make use of such a shorthand?
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2 comments:
My reaction to this article is both cynical and uneducated, but I believe that while at first this seems romantic and beautiful that all the sonnets are so different, it doesn't really mean anything at all. A grocery list or the lyrics to a rap song could have the same "uniqueness" to each of its parts and have every part be different just as all of his 154 sonnets were different, but that doesn't make me think any differently about it. The number of letters and "value" of each letter has nothing to do with the message of the poem, so saying that this infographic proves the uniqueness of his sonnets is misleading. It doesn't prove they all had different themes or messages or were fundamentally different poems, it just meant he used different words in different places for each one-- which is kind of the point of writing. Maybe I'm not educated enough in literary things-- after all, I'm going off my definition of what makes a poem fundamentally itself and not a professional writer's definition-- but in my opinion this infographic is pretty but not actually useful.
I have to agree with Lucy, what they are showing in these pictures is not the uniqueness of each of the sonnets but simply the way the letters are put together to form words. The meaning of the sonnet is completely lost when looking at these doodles. Sure, it is interesting to look at, but had I not known they were Shakespeasre’s sonnets, I would have just thought they were someone practicing how to use a pressure sensitive stylus in photoshop. It kind of reminds me of what someone said once. That everything we read is just the same 26 letters rearranged. And yet we have billions of works of literature and science that are all unique. It is not the letters that make it unique, its the way they are used. I think this article is interesting, but it doesn't really “prove” how unique Shakespeare is because the sonnets are already different. They use different words. That is the point.
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