2025/10/19 by Sriharsh Bhyravajjula, Bhyravajjula, Sriharsh, Melanie Walsh +5 · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Authorship Attribution and Profiling #Computational and Text Analysis Methods #Computational linguistics #Digital Humanities and Scholarship #Disk formatting #Feature (linguistics) #Poetry #Popularity #Task (project management)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2510.16713
published in arXiv (Cornell University) (Cornell University)
openalex publication_date 2025/10/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/22 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Whitespace is a critical component of poetic form, reflecting both adherence to standardized forms and rebellion against those forms. Each poem's whitespace distribution reflects the artistic choices of the poet and is an integral semantic and spatial feature of the poem. Yet, despite the popularity of poetry as both a long-standing art form and as a generation task for large language models (LLMs), whitespace has not received sufficient attention from the NLP community. Using a corpus of 19k English-language published poems from Poetry Foundation, we investigate how 4k poets have used whitespace in their works. We release a subset of 2.8k public-domain poems with preserved formatting to facilitate further research in this area. We compare whitespace usage in the published poems to (1) 51k LLM-generated poems, and (2) 12k unpublished poems posted in an online community. We also explore whitespace usage across time periods, poetic forms, and data sources. Additionally, we find that different text processing methods can result in significantly different representations of whitespace in poetry data, motivating us to use these poems and whitespace patterns to discuss implications for the processing strategies used to assemble pretraining datasets for LLMs.