Patterns in Style Evolution of Poets

This article investigates the problem of style stability and variation over time and presents the results of analysis of style evolution of American romantic poet H.W. Longfellow. The feature set includes 29 morphological and syntactic characteristics. The method of multivariate discriminant analysis is used. The study showed significant style changes over time and made it possible to single out the major tendencies of style evolution: the poet in his mature verses returns to the characteristics of his early lyrics. Besides, comparison of the variable and stable characteristics demonstrated that the initial part of the line is connected with style evolution, whereas the end of the line (which is the rhymed position) is less variable over time. The results may be useful for authorship attribution and manuscript dating research.