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. The current word count is words.

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.

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Please show me a randomly selected poem