Byron's "Prometheus" and Can Voyant Highlight Literary Features for Analysis?

Voyant and Byron's "Prometheus"

Voyant and Leigh Hunt's "How Robin and His Outlaws Lived in the Woods"

For this week's investigation into Romantic poetry and the Digital Humanities, I chose to look at Byron's "Prometheus." This poem cast Prometheus as a hero and Zeus as the the villain. Byron's spin on this Greek myth shows how power and pride can be misused and abused in order to maintain a feeling of superiority over ones environment and lower classes. The poet humanizes Prometheus for his willingness to help a weaker and most likely miserable human race, who was created by Zeus but not endowed with the power to create fire, an essential resource even today. The poet calls Prometheus' suffering a victory in the end because his pride has led him to suffer this torture in silence. The poet likens Prometheus to humans in that he is part human and part God, but his human side can sympathize with human suffering, which is why he defies Zeus.

I chose to input "Prometheus" into Voyant to try and help me to understand the text better and to pull out some key components that I may have looked over otherwise.

Cirrus

Inputting the text into Voyant immediately showed me a cloud of the terms in the document. Although these maps are not the best for understanding the complete context of the text, it was able to pull out key terms that appeared throughout "Prometheus" multiple times. The larger words, such as "man" and "recompense," as well as a few others, appeared the most—three times. This map seems to be useful as a preliminary investigative tool to pull out the general themes of a text.

Trends

Trend Data from Voyant that displays where the term "recompense" appears

Trend Data from Voyant that displays where the term "man" appears

I also was able to look for trends in the textual data through Voyant. This analysis led to me to see the text in new ways, visually mapping the frequencies and relationships between some of the more repeated key terms, such as "man" and "recompense," allowing me to see general trends in different areas of "Prometheus". One thing I noticed right away was the recurrence of "recompense" at the beginning and end of the poem. Byron began and ended with recompense in order to display to the audience what the Titan received for his disobedience. Although tortured for his deed, by the end of the poem we can see the question Byron posed at the beginning; Prometheus' recompense seems to be his over victorious stance against Zeus' wrath and torture of both himself and humans. Without this tool, I may have overlooked the importance of this term or simply ignored it.

Another word that the trend data isolated was the word "man." I found it interesting that this word appeared only toward the last half of the essay and not at the beginning. This visualization of the data allowed me to understand the thematic organization of the essay a little more fully. It seems that the first half of the poem focuses more on the deed that Prometheus was guilty of, providing the fire to humans; yet the second half of the poem seems to humanize the Titan. Byron seems to do this by equating him to man in terms of divinity and calling them both "A troubled stream from a pure source," meaning that both man and Prometheus are less than Gods for their decisions. I do not necessarily see Byron reducing the reverence of a Greek deity as much as showing reverence to a human act of kindness. By humanizing Prometheus, Byron is able to display how one being can make the world a better place by standing up to an oppressive ruler and feeling pity to those less fortunate. That seems to be what Prometheus' recompense is.

Correlations

Although the data set was small, I figured I would also look for any possible correlations between terms within the text. The correlations, although statistically significant, cannot necessarily be relied upon due to the small data set; however, the correlational data that showed up provided yet another way to get a richer understanding of the text. These correlations show major themes and ideas with the text. "Suffering" and "titan" show the state of Prometheus throughout Byron's poem, while "man" and "wretchedness" display how man was thought of by the gods. Although this data is useless in terms of research, Voyant seems to have the potential to not only highlight features within literature, it seems to have the potential to do larger scale corpus analysis, something that could benefit Rhetoric and Composition scholars like myself.