TRACING TENNYSON’S STYLISTIC SHIFTS: STYLOMETRIC INSIGHTS FROM EARLY LYRICS TO LATE EPICS

This study employs computational stylometry to empirically trace the evolution of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poetic style across three chronological phases: his early lyrics, his middle period centered on In Memoriam A.H.H., and his late epic cycle, Idylls of the King. To investigate these stylistic shifts, the research adopts a hybrid methodology that combines macroscopic distant-reading techniques (using the stylo package in R for Cluster Analysis and PCA) with granular linguistic profiling (using a transformer-based NLP pipeline in Python). The macroscopic analyses reveal a stylistic rupture in the late period; this demonstrates that Tennyson’s epic voice represents a structural departure from the stylistic foundation shared by his early and middle-period works. The Python-based analysis further shows that this late epic style was achieved through an active syntactic reconstruction characterized by increased sentence length, extended dependency distances, a shift from adjectival description to action-oriented verbs, and a heightened density of archaic diction. In contrast, the analyses identify the middle period as a peak in lexical diversity. It is marked by an objective, philosophical tone operating within a regularized syntactic framework. In conclusion, by translating literary concepts such as “lyric” and “epic” into quantifiable linguistic metrics, this digital-humanities approach provides robust empirical evidence that supports and refines traditional critical understandings of Tennyson's dynamic artistic development.