Evolution of the Poetic Canon in the Princeton Prosody Archive (1532-1929). Turnover and Continuity.

Poetry’s afterlife often begins when its lines are called into service. In the instructional world of prosody and elocution, poets and poems become examples: quotable pieces of literary evidence through which knowledge about poetry is made teachable. With more than 7,000 texts published between 1532 and 1929, the Princeton Prosody Archive (PPA) preserves the long and uneven history of this instructional tradition, from pronunciation guides and rhetorical treatises to schoolbooks and works of literary instruction. It offers a way to study canon formation not only through what was admired or preserved, but through what teachers, critics, and theorists found useful.

This paper uses the PPA to study canonization as a process of pedagogical anchoring: the making of poetic authority through use. Poets move through the archive at different speeds and with different degrees of durability. Some become stable reference points, invoked repeatedly as instruments for explaining poetic form. Others appear only briefly, tied to a particular moment, topic, or instructional need, before disappearing from view. At the level of poems, this movement is more fragmented: works enter prosodic instruction as lines, couplets, phrases, or metrical specimens, detached from their original settings and made to serve local explanatory purposes. Some become reservoirs of quotable lines, repeatedly broken into examples; others survive only as fleeting acts of citation. Combining large-scale corpus analysis, text-reuse methods, and probabilistic modelling, we trace canonization in this record of poetic exemplarity as a historical process: the gradual making, unmaking, and remaking of the poets and poems through which poetry itself was taught.