Memory, Syntax and Metre in Dante: Verse Composition and Digital Tools

Poetry’s most natural home is in the memory – something true even of the most intensely written poems in the European tradition. Even ‘dyers, drapers, [and] shopkeepers’, Petrarch tells us, memorized and performed Dante’s Commedia. Using new NLP (Natural Language Processing) tools, I’ll uncover the way Dante remembers his own verses – and the way he uses that memory to make new ones. The aim is to uncover something of the poet's compositional method, and so to address a question that goes far beyond Dante studies: how do poets write by thinking generatively within their formal constraints?

Speaker Bio:  Ryan Pepin is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of York. After completing his PhD on Dante at Cambridge (2020), he was a postdoc at the Medieval Latin Institute, University of Vienna, and Marco Praloran Fellow at the Fondazione Ezio Franceschini in Florence. Just prior to coming to York, he was Visiting Professor at the University of Notre Dame.