Search Results (64)

Vajrayāna teaching places the guru outside space and time, while simultaneously manifest in the teacher’s physical body. Those who regard Danzanravjaa primarily as a Buddhist teacher even today have his poems as a potent source of his teaching and consequently as a catalyst for their own spiritual development. But what can we hear across two centuries, and how can we actively listen to his religious teaching through his singular, aphoristic, and complex poetics? And to what extent can we understand today his nomadic perspective on Buddhist teaching in order better to understand the particular nature of Mongolian Buddhism? This paper will examine Danzanravjaa’s poetry in both Mongolian and Tibetan through the intertwining outer, inner, and secret levels of Tibeto-Mongolian Vajrayāna Buddhism, listening to how his poetic language and down-to-earth themes might have spoken to his contemporaries, as well as how they might speak to us today. In doing so, it presents Danzanravjaa’s poetry in a different light—not in terms of nineteenth century literature but as actionable spiritual wisdom from a teacher who, like any other, presents his own direct apprehension of Buddha nature in a challenging, personal style. Full article

Existing approaches to the automatic annotation of classical Chinese poetry often fail to generate precise source citations and depend heavily on manual segmentation, limiting their scalability and accuracy. To address these shortcomings, we propose a novel paradigm that integrates dictionary retrieval with retrieval-augmented large language model enhancements for automatic poetic annotation. Our method leverages the contextual understanding capabilities of large models to dynamically select appropriate lexical senses and employs an automated segmentation technique to minimize reliance on manual splitting. For poetic segments absent from standard dictionaries, the system retrieves pertinent information from a domain-specific knowledge base and generates definitions grounded in this auxiliary data, thereby substantially improving both annotation accuracy and coverage. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms general-purpose large language models and pre-trained classical Chinese language models on automatic annotation tasks; notably, it achieves a micro-averaged accuracy of 94.33% on key semantic segments. By delivering more precise and comprehensive annotations, this framework advances the computational analysis of classical Chinese poetry and offers significant potential for intelligent teaching applications and digital humanities research. Full article

The Mysteries of Udolpho was published at a time when poetry and music were being redefined, along with the notions of imitation and expression. From a precedence of word over music, theorists, musicians and composers started reconsidering the hierarchy of arts, which led to a new appreciation of both sung music and instrumental music. Ann Radcliffe’s novel is replete with pleasing sounds and mysterious melodies, working both as part of her décor and general soundscape and as a key element of the narrative. Given the novel’s musical profusion and versatility, one may wonder how to adapt its musicality into actual music. This paper, therefore, endeavors to define the balance of imitation and expression in The Mysteries of Udolpho and questions the ability of other media, especially those relying on sounds, to adapt its musical richness. It first focuses on the novel’s inscription in the larger context of musical theory, before delving into the limits of language’s sound mimesis and its counteracting expressivity. The final part is a case study of three artworks inspired by Radcliffe’s novel: John Bray’s song “Soft as yon’s silver ray that sleeps”, Catherine Czerkawska’s radio dramatization The Mysteries of Udolpho, and Marc Morvan and Benjamin Jarry’s album Udolpho. Full article

Arabic poetry follows intricate rhythmic patterns known as ‘arūḍ’ (prosody), which makes its automated categorization particularly challenging. While earlier studies primarily relied on conventional machine learning and recurrent neural networks, this work evaluates the effectiveness of transformer-based models—an area not extensively explored for this task. We investigate several pretrained transformer models, including Arabic Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (Arabic-BERT), BERT base Arabic (AraBERT), Arabic Efficiently Learning an Encoder that Classifies Token Replacements Accurately (AraELECTRA), Computational Approaches to Modeling Arabic BERT (CAMeLBERT), Multi-dialect Arabic BERT (MARBERT), and Modern Arabic BERT (ARBERT), alongside deep learning models such as Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) and Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Units (BiGRU). This study uses half-verse data across 14 m. The CAMeLBERT model achieved the highest performance, with an accuracy of 90.62% and an F1-score of 0.91, outperforming other models. We further analyze feature significance and model behavior using the Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) interpretability technique. The LIME-based analysis highlights key linguistic features that most influence model predictions. These findings demonstrate the strengths and limitations of each method and pave the way for further advancements in Arabic poetry analysis using deep learning. Full article

The Holy Bible is the most read book in the world, originally written in Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek over a time span in the order of centuries by many people, and formed by a combination of various literary styles, such as stories, prophecies, poetry, instructions, and others. As such, the Bible is a complex text to be analyzed by humans and machines. This paper provides a systematic survey of the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and some of its subareas to the analysis of the Biblical scriptures. Emphasis is given to what types of tasks are being solved, what are the main AI algorithms used, and their limitations. The findings deliver a general perspective on how this field is being developed, along with its limitations and gaps. This research follows a procedure based on three steps: planning (defining the review protocol), conducting (performing the survey), and reporting (formatting the report). The results obtained show there are seven main tasks solved by AI in the Bible analysis: machine translation, authorship identification, part of speech tagging (PoS tagging), semantic annotation, clustering, categorization, and Biblical interpretation. Also, the classes of AI techniques with better performance when applied to Biblical text research are machine learning, neural networks, and deep learning. The main challenges in the field involve the nature and style of the language used in the Bible, among others. Full article

In this article, we share our findings on patients’ experiences creating digital stories about living with advanced cancer, represented through found poetry. Over a period of 12 months, patients from the program “Managing Cancer and Living Meaningfully” (CALM) completed digital stories about their experiences living with cancer. Digital stories are short, personalized videos that combine photographs, imagery, narration, and music to communicate a personal experience about a topic of inquiry. Patient interviews were conducted about the digital storytelling process. Found poetry guided the analysis technique. It is a form of arts-based research that involves using words and phrases found in interview transcripts to create poems that represent research themes. This article begins with a brief overview of the psychosocial intervention CALM, arts in healthcare, and found poetry, followed by the project background. The found poems represent themes of emotional impact, legacy making, and support and collaboration. Findings also indicate the inherently relational aspect of digital storytelling as participants emphasized the integral role of the digital storytelling facilitator. What follows is a discussion on digital storytelling, which considers the role of found poetry in representing patient voices in the research process. Full article

This paper will delineate Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s (EBB) allusions to Hebrew in her writing, both personal and public, and her ambivalent attitude towards the Hebrew language and how it is related to her views on poetry and religious identity. Although most critics have focused on EBB’s knowledge of Greek, her use of Hebrew, whether translated, transliterated, or presented in the original Hebrew characters, reveals her concept of poetic language and her core religious beliefs. In her collections of poems published in 1838 and 1844, EBB reiterates her concept of Hebrew as a sacred language, a language endowed with what Bourdieu would term symbolical capital, and superior to other languages. However, her correspondence reveals an ambivalence towards Hebrew: it is a “primitive” language that she does not wish to be associated with on the one hand and revered in relation to Spiritualism and the medium George Bush on the other. Finally, the appearances of Hebrew in her works constitute what Derrida terms a poetic Shibboleth, meant to define who is to be accepted into the realm of sacred poetry and who is to be left out. Ironically, it is the anxiety around this double-edged Shibboleth that ultimately brings about the disappearance of Hebrew letters from EBB’s poems written after 1844. Full article

The poetry of distant country with different culture and language is always distinctive and fascinating. Chinese and Romanian belong to Sinitic languages of the Sino-Tibetan language family and Romance languages of the Indo-European language family, which have relatively different syntax and general imagery of literature. Therefore, in this study, we make an attempt that was rarely involved in previous poetry generation research, using modern Chinese as the carrier, and generating modern poetry with Romanian style based on pre-trained model and direct preference optimization. Using a 5-point grading system, human evaluators awarded scores ranging from 3.21 to 3.83 across seven evaluation perspectives for the generated poems, achieving 76.2% to 91.6% of the comparable scores for the Chinese translations of authentic Romanian poems. The coincidence of the 30th to the 50th most frequently occurring poetic images in both generated poems and Romanian poems can reach 58.0–63.3%. Human evaluation and comparative statistical results on poetic imagery show that direct preference optimization is of great help in improving the degree of stylization, and the model can successfully create Chinese modern poems with Romanian style. Full article

It is easy to underestimate Ruth. The story is short and sweet, in elementary Hebrew, about a loyal and obedient daughter-in-law, or so we have been led to believe. The book and its eponymous character are surprisingly complex. Although Ruth is an exemplar of Hebrew narrative, it contains two poetic insertions in the first chapter. Literal translations lose the poetry, and poetic translations are less faithful to the original language. Ruth has been chosen for road-testing a range of hermeneutical approaches, and here is one more. This paper approaches these poetic insertions and, indeed, the book of Ruth, as poetry and explores a new method for examining and interpreting Hebrew poetic texts, namely, exegetical poetry. I pay particular attention to poetic devices—parsing for parallelism, alliteration, and other poetic elements—and explore their significance. As I translate and exegete, I compose poetry reflecting the form, content, and theological themes of the Hebrew poetry through the use of similar English devices, imagery, and mood. The result is an amalgam of showing through exegetical poetry and telling through prose commentary, enriching our understanding of the characterization of Ruth and Naomi, and the relationship between these poetic insertions and the broader narrative. Full article

Paul Celan’s ‘Speeches’ determine what poetry is and why we need it. He does not want ‘timeless’ poetry but still ‘lays claim to infinity’; he would ‘reach through time’. He neither refuses poetry as contrary to reason, nor elevates it as pure immediacy of meaning. He questions the ambivalent attitudes towards art—as ‘artifice’ or as ‘profound’. Celan cuts into the loose fabric of such ordinary language to shape it. Those who trumpet ‘plain sense’ against such incisive art deface it as degenerate. Celan’s poetic language presents us as ‘of the earth’ and as ‘released from it’—Büchner’s Lenz seeks clarity in the silence of alpine light but falls into madness in his isolation. He is drawn towards the life of the villagers at the foot of the mountains. He perceives the warm household fires, but it is an illusion that he can be a part of that scene. Thus, Celan enquires into art’s intensity. It is at the risk of reciprocity that a reader entertains the language of a poem. Eliot’s old ‘shadow’ between ‘the idea and the reality’ now falls between the poet’s production and the reader’s reciprocation. The reader may need someone with a free hand to hold a lantern to the script. Full article

Poetry and philosophy have had a close but uneasy relationship in the western tradition. Both share an eschewal of the discovery of novel facts, but are somewhat opposed in that discovery is a central aim of poetry, but not at all the aim of philosophy. Through a close reading of W.H. Auden’s ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’ and a versification of part of G.E. Moore’s ‘A Defence of Common Sense’, I argue that what poetry shows corresponds, in a broadly symbolist sense, to Wittgenstein’s understanding of the miraculous nature of the world. In this regard, poetry can offer philosophy clarity, in the form of its tonal architecture, value, and ethics, and may also constitute a perspicuous representation. Poetry remains in a perpetual mode of potential, as well as being possessed of a vatic autonomy. Full article

The authenticity of classical Arabic poetry has long been challenged by claims that some part of the pre-Islamic poetic heritage should not be attributed to this era. According to these assertions, some of this legacy was produced after the advent of Islam and ascribed, for different reasons, to pre-Islamic poets. As pre-Islamic poets were illiterate, medieval Arabic literature devotees relied on Bedouin oral transmission when writing down and collecting the poems about two centuries later. This process left the identity of the real poets who composed these poems and the period in which they worked unresolved. In this work, we seek to answer the questions of how and to what extent we can identify the period in which classical Arabic poetry was composed, where we exploit modern-day automatic text processing techniques for this aim. We consider a dataset of Arabic poetry collected from the diwans (‘collections of poems’) of thirteen Arabic poets that corresponds to two main eras: the pre-ʿAbbāsid era (covering the period between the 6th and the 8th centuries CE) and the ʿAbbāsid era (starting in the year 750 CE). Some poems in each diwan are considered ‘original’; i.e., poems that are attributed to a certain poet with high confidence. The diwans also include, however, an additional section of poems that are attributed to a poet with reservations, meaning that these poems might have been composed by another poet and/or in another period. We trained a set of machine learning algorithms (classifiers) in order to explore the potential of machine learning techniques to automatically identify the period in which a poem had been written. In the training phase, we represent each poem using various types of features (characteristics) designed to capture lexical, topical, and stylistic aspects of this poetry. By training and assessing automatic models of period prediction using the ‘original’ poetry, we obtained highly encouraging results, measuring between 0.73–0.90 in terms of F1 for the various periods. Moreover, we observe that the stylistic features, which pertain to elements that characterize Arabic poetry, as well as the other feature types, are all indicative of the period in which the poem had been written. We applied the resulting prediction models to poems for which the authorship period is under dispute (‘attributed’) and got interesting results, suggesting that some of the poems may belong to different eras—an issue to be further examined by Arabic poetry researchers. The resulting prediction models may be applied to poems for which the authorship period is under dispute. We demonstrate this research direction, presenting some interesting anecdotal results. Full article

In this paper I hope to cast light on Wittgenstein enigmatic remark, “one should really only create philosophy poetically”. I discuss Wittgenstein’s ambition to overcome metaphysics by way of an appeal to ordinary language. For this purpose I contrast “realism” in philosophy (i.e., metaphysical realism, particularly its modern scientific version) with “realism” in poetry. My theme is the capacity of poetry to provide a model for Wittgenstein’s resistance to the inhumanity unleashed in metaphysics—exemplified by two distinct forms of skepticism—which obliterates the ordinary world under the guise of discovering its true nature. The poem I shall use to illustrate the difficulty in maintaining our grip on reality, hence our grip on our humanity, is Czeslaw Milosz’s poem “Realism”. Full article

Theoretically, a poem can begin in any way. What does it mean that in practice, poems often begin in a particular way—that is, by returning to a fragment of some prior thing? We see this in the encore of John Milton’s opening to Lycidas (‘Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more’); differently, we see this in the widely used convention of the poetic epigraph (for instance, T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ begins with six lines from Dante’s Inferno). While there is an established model for understanding the beginning as an act that invokes poetic precedent, this paper seeks to expose the beginning’s logic of return to a broader sense of language that is beyond the remit of poetic tradition as such. With a focus on the epigraph, this paper thinks about the everyday existence of poems and about how this existence relates to ordinary language, asking, how do these different modes of language function together? How does ordinary language collude in the creation of poetry? In its enactment of the passage of language from one mode of existence to another, the beginning of a poem might offer some answers to these questions. Full article