Irene R. Falrley 
C.W.Post College, L.I.U. 
Greenvale, New York 
• Stylistic Analysis of Poetry 
The Trlcon program has been adapted as an aid to the 
analysis of syntax in poetry with the hope of identifying 
the dominant patterns that characterize a poet's style. 
The Trlcon program (described in Concordances from Com- ~ 
, S.M.Lamb and L.Gould, University of Callf0~nia, 
ey,1964)has three active lines which this research- 
er has used for text, syntactic analysis (following a 
phrase-str~cture grammar) and a deviance indicator. The 
analysis for the three lines is charted and then trans- 
fered to punched cards. Abbreviated alphabetical symbols 
are used for the syntactic analysis (AP=adJective phrase) 
because of the program's 24unlt search limitation. 
The program provides the usual textual concordances 
for vocabulary, punctuation, etc., and a concordance of 
syntactic patterns and deviances. Syntactic and deviance 
lines may be concorded for identiSal units (wholes: ~-I~P- 
PP-P) Or for partials (all tokens for S or P). The pro- 
gram has a wide range of subsort possibilities including 
multl-dlmenslonal crossconcordance : subsorts are possible 
by left or right context on all three lines. It also has 
the advantage of a neat multi-line centered print-out, 
so that the searched token appears with left and ri~nt 
context; this is especially helpful in the analysis of 
poetry. The concordances provide totals of the number of 
tokens for each type as well as totals of the number of 
types and tokens searched. 
An extensive analysis of a poet' s poems with the aid 
of a program llke Trlcon could provide the basis for a 
formulaic expression of the poet's syntactic habits, as 
a set of patterns and deviances. This kind of analysis 
might aid in the comparison of styles by Identifylng 
differences in their dominant and minor syntactic 
patterns and deviations (qualitative distinctions) and 
the variations in their frequencies of occurrence (quan- 
tltatfwe distinctions). Such a formal treatment, of 
course, looks far into the future, and a program llke Trl- 
con must be regarded as at best a breaking of ground. 
This researcher is exploring Tricon' s possibilities in 
the analysis of e.e. cummings poetry. A substantial 
analysis of hlspoems usln~ Trlcon would help determine 
what syntactic patterms create the "cummings style" and 
to what extent and in what manner they are deviant from 
the standard grammar of English. 
