Correspondence Analysis of Tennyson’s Characteristic Use of Modal Adverbs

Abstract

This research aims to investigate the characteristic use of modal adverbs in Alfred Tennyson’s poetry. Numerous studies on Tennyson’s poems have paid critical attention to stylistic similarities between Tennyson and other poets; however, previous studies have seldom referenced Tennyson’s lexical choices by their parts of speech. Previous studies allude to, examine, or critique Tennyson’s style, syntax, or language, and they frequently concentrate on individual words that appear in certain poems, e.g., sea, nothing, or sun. Using a quantitative approach called correspondence analysis (CA), this study examines Tennyson’s distinctive modal adverbs and discovers that, when compared to the poems of eleven other Augustan, Romantic, and Victorian poets, maybe and mayhap are the most common modal adverbs in Tennyson. The discussion examines why the words maybe and mayhap are prevalent in Tennyson’s poetry. Although this study focuses only on fifteen modal adverbs and eleven works of referenced poets, it nonetheless discloses several novel characteristics of Tennyson’s style and demonstrates how effective correspondence analysis is as a tool in investigating verse texts as well as for reading into “unread” portions of literary works.