The importance of computerized phonetic analysis of literary texts is slowly being recognized. Textual stylistics, as Ian Lancashire mentions in A Companion to the Digital Humanities, should ideally study the sound of a text rather than the spelling of a text. I shall discuss enhancements to my poetic analysis computer program and their application to poetic textual stylistics.

The application can draw a bitmap representation of the phonetic content of a poem. Using the synchronous theory of poetic metrics, the application weighs all syllables of a line equally. Phonemes within each syllable are then weighted according to the number of phonemes within that syllable. The result is an image that reveals subtle phonetic patterns in the poem. In an effort to characterize the phonetic content of a poem, the application can produce a "key": a representation of the most probable phonetic distributions within the lines of a poem. This key is a characterization of the impression upon the reader of the phonetic content of the lines. It is also the first step in identifying a phonetic "fingerprint" left (subconsciously) by the poet on his or her poems. For convenience, the key is also represented as a bitmap image.

Using this key, I shall demonstrate first a relatively naive, yet general classification scheme: hyper-lyrical, lyrical, and prosaic. The computer application can quantify the degree of lyricality of any poem, thereby separating prosaic poems from, say, nursery rhymes and lyrics to popular songs. A more sophisticated application of the phonetic key is to quantify degrees of relatedness between poems or sets of poems. Victorian poetry was dominated by the poetry of Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning, whose works were often taken as at the two extremes of the poetic yardstick. The immediate successors of Tennyson and Browning, such as Swinburne, were necessarily influenced by both, but tended to claim one over the other as their poetic father. Swinburne once wrote that the speakers of Browning's poems utter "mere inarticulations jerked up by painful fits out of the noisy verbal whirlpools of a clamorous chaos." This comment reveals his alignment with Tennyson. But does Swinburne’s poetry really display a closer kinship with that of Tennyson than with that of Browning? By comparing the poems of Swinburne against the phonetic keys of the poems of Browning and Tennyson, my computer application can answer that and related questions with a quantifiable response.