Wow, your search engine project sounds really neat! What a cool idea.
Thanks for the tips re: Shakespeare and Hopkins. I'll definitely dig in there. One of the tricky things with poets like Shakespeare is that many of his sonnets' lines I personally wouldn't consider to be iambic pentameter. Take the first line of Sonnet 29 for example: if I were reading that without affectation I'd put emphasis on "When" and "men's," while iambic requires that those be unstressed.
I don't know if speech patterns were different enough in Shakespeare's day that it sounded more natural with different stresses than we'd use today, but if I were evaluating that poem blind and didn't know it was Shakespeare I'd give it low marks for requiring a relatively forced inflection. Just my opinion, though!
Thanks for the tips re: Shakespeare and Hopkins. I'll definitely dig in there. One of the tricky things with poets like Shakespeare is that many of his sonnets' lines I personally wouldn't consider to be iambic pentameter. Take the first line of Sonnet 29 for example: if I were reading that without affectation I'd put emphasis on "When" and "men's," while iambic requires that those be unstressed.
I don't know if speech patterns were different enough in Shakespeare's day that it sounded more natural with different stresses than we'd use today, but if I were evaluating that poem blind and didn't know it was Shakespeare I'd give it low marks for requiring a relatively forced inflection. Just my opinion, though!