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Poetry Word Cloud

1/18/22

When I had 2,456 poems, I decided to make a word cloud using the 53,590 words from these poems because I was curious about the frequencies of repeatedly used words. The current poem count is poems, which can be read here.

Here are the steps of how I made the word cloud:

  1. Paste all the lines of each poem into a column in Excel
  2. Use Excel's "Text to Columns" feature, delimiting by space, to put each word into a column
  3. Paste each of the columns into a single column
  4. Use Excel's functions lower(), trim(), clean(), to make the text lowercase and remove extra spaces
  5. Remove "stop words" (like "the", "of", "a", etc.") and non-letter characters (like "(", ")", "?", "!", "-", etc.) from the analysis
  6. Copy/paste this column into a Free Word Cloud Generator or similar site
  7. Choose a color scheme you like and generate and save the .jpg

The result:

My summary is that I like writing about water, colors, and nature in general in my poems.

I plan to recreate the word cloud on an infrequent basis, say every few thousand poems or so. I am interested in how this word cloud could change over time.

Thanks for reading.

Please show me a randomly selected poem

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