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Trends in poetry reading
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From: Charles Bayless <charles.bayless_at_gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2014 13:03:59 -0400
Still trying to get some additional empirical perspective and insight on the topic of children and poetry. One of my perennial concerns is the extent to which passion and conviction can overtake perspective and objectivity. Too often we see what we want to see: this a general phenomenon, not restricted to children's literature by any means. Cognitive bias (seeing only affirming information to a predicate assumption) and the Semmelweiss reflex
(incapacity to comprehend information inconsistent with predicate assumptions) are common to everyone. In children's literature there are particular risks. The values, goals and interests of adult readers are distinctly different from those of children. What appeals to adults is not the same as that which appeals to children (as an illustration between what adults like and what children like, see the recommended poetry/verse books in this discussion versus the most popular circulating poetry/verse books provided by Crystal B.). In addition, the values, goals and interests of different adult groups (parents, teachers, librarians, issue advocates, pedagogical researchers, authors and publicists, etc. ) are inconsistent
(and often in conflict) with one another as well as being different from those of children. Further, reading is quite distinctively personal and contextual, i.e. there are enormous variances by SES, physical location
(urban, suburban, rural), personal circumstance, etc.
Localism, individualism, confirmation bias and Semmelwiess reflex are all factors contributing to the 90% failure rate seen by the DOE when rigorously testing educational policies that have been demonstrated to work locally but then can't be replicated under neutral conditions. Distinguishing the empirical "is" from the subjective "ought to be" can be challenging.
To that end, I was wondering about how the general public engage with poetry reading and how and in what ways has that changed over time? As already discussed, we know that only about 7% of the population read poetry at all and only 3% read poetry regularly. But what about trends over time? Are we reading less poetry or are we as interested in children's poetry as in the past? I used Google Trends and Google Ngram Viewer to try and get at some answers.
Google Trends was released in 2005 (the earliest data is 2004) and tracks the relative frequency of a search term compared to all searches (in other words it is normalized). It allows you to compare up to five terms to one another and to view trends over time up to the present month. Google Trends captures the vox populi to a greater extent and consequently is more subject to the vernacular than Ngram Viewer. For example, Poems for Kids is a heavily used search term in Trends but doesn't show up in Ngram Viewer for reasons discussed below.
Ngram Viewer allows you to search multiple terms in several million books Google has already scanned. The last data update was in 2008 so you can only search up to that point. Because they are published books, language search terms are somewhat more formal than the vernacular found in Trends. I think of Ngram as more the voice of the clerisy or the cognitive elite whereas Trends is the vox populi. Ngram covers the topics of interest to people who write books to be read by the people who read books; i.e. a smaller section of the overall population. Trends sheds light on the interests of anyone with access to a computer.
These two tools allow some additional insight into what people are interested in (Trends) and talking about (Ngram Viewer).
Results - Children's Poems and Poetry
I restricted Ngram Viewer to 1900-2008 and to the American English corpus
(i.e. books in America) and used a smoothing factor of 2 (to better see trend lines). You may be able to click on the following url to see the results directly. http://tinyurl.com/lmec73d
"Poetry for children" and "Poems for children" follow substantially the same trend lines. "Poems for kids" and "Poetry for kids" occur too infrequently in Ngram Viewer to return a result.
There was a sharp rise in interest in children's poetry starting in the late teens and early twenties, rising to a peak in 1932. This was followed by a sharp drop with the approach of WWII and then a plateau through to 1965. Interest rose again to a secondary peak in 1970 followed by a long slow decline since then to 2008. Interest level today (based on Ngram Viewer) is about 25% of what it was in the early 1930s and 45% of what it was in 1970.
So are the clerisy as focused on poetry for children and poems for children as they were in the past? Regrettably, the evidence indicates that there is quite a substantial drop in book-based discussion of poetry for children.
What about what the general public is interested in (compared to authors of books)? I tried several terms. YA poetry is hardly referenced at all (it is flat lined at 0 through till late 2013 when there is a spike). "Poems for kids" and "Poems for children" are the search terms with the highest relative hits followed by "Poetry for kids" and "Poetry for children".
"Poetry for children" shows continued decline from 2004 to Present, consistent with Ngram. The same is true for "Poems for children" and
"Poetry for kids" but at a slightly higher search frequency. The results are here: http://tinyurl.com/pc8hkbv
Interestingly, in late 2009 there is a large surge in interest in "Poems for kids", peaking in mid-2010. "Poems for kids" is searched more than twice as often as the next highest search term "Poems for children". By March 2014 it has declined 75% in absolute terms but is still the preferred search term by nearly a factor of three.
To get a relative sense of interest, I compared the most popular search term
("Poems for kids") with some basic canonical texts. "Bible" swamps the lines; it is searched orders of magnitude more often. Even "Harry Potter" shows up in searches some five or six times as often as "Poems for kids". Winnie the Pooh is searched three or four times as often as "Poems for kids". Little House on the Prairie is the closest comparable I found in terms of frequency of search for "Poems for kids". http://tinyurl.com/lhgzarf
I also looked at the simple category "Poems" (http://tinyurl.com/nqw2v82). While searched far more often than "Poems for kids", it also shows a continuing decline in popular interest since 2004, March 2014 being about 25% of the high in May 2004.
Finally, I did a search for "Poems" and "Poetry"
(http://tinyurl.com/ljalhzz) in Ngram Viewer. Peaks in the early 1930s and then again in the mid-1960s a steady decline since then of about 30%.
Results - Poetry Collections and Poetry Anthologies
I did a similar exercise for "Poetry Collections", "Poetry Anthologies",
"Children's Poetry Collections", "Children's Poetry Anthologies" to get a sense if there were some changes in interest over time. As a bookseller, anthologies tend to be much more popular than collections but what is the clerisy and the general public interested in?
Comparing the broad categories of "Poetry Collections" and "Poetry Anthologies" (http://tinyurl.com/mjosmkl), there is indeed a shift in interest in the more cerebral part of the market (authors of books). In Ngram Viewer (books), there was about an equal discussion of poetry anthologies and poetry collections up to about 1970. In 1970 Poetry Collections took off and are now discussed three times as often as Poetry Anthologies. There is also an increasing interest in poetry as discussed by authors with poetry collections discussed at six times the rate in 2008 as in 1970 and poetry anthologies nearly twice as much. So while there is a general decline (in Ngram) in interest in "Poems" and "Poetry", there is an increasing interest in "Anthologies" and "Collections" perhaps reflecting an increasing specialization of interest.
Very interestingly, it is completely a different matter for "Children's Poetry Collections" and "Children's Poetry Anthologies"
(http://tinyurl.com/jwovmsx). "Children's poetry collections" are virtually undiscussed in Ngram Viewer but anthologies have some pretty steady discussion since 1945. There are peaks in 1953, in 1983 and in 2000 with ebbs and flows in between.
If you look at the trends in searches, there is a somewhat different story than in Ngram Viewer (http://tinyurl.com/lscth5c). People search for poetry anthologies at about twice the rate as they do collections. And in March 2014 they are searching for anthologies and collections at about 25% the rate they were in 2004, with a sustained decline between 2004 and 2014.
There were insufficient volume of searches to return Trend results for either "Children's Poetry Collections" or "Children's Poetry Anthologies".
Results - Memorizing and reciting poetry
Some 76% of adult readers report having had to memorize poems as a child. I don't know of any studies linking poetry memorization with adult outcomes but my personal sense is that my own engagement with poetry took a positive and more substantive turn once I was required in high school to memorize large chunks of Shakespeare and poetry for recitation. Nothing like having to memorize something to catalyze a deep engagement with it.
So what are the trends? It is perhaps significant that there are insufficient searches on "memorizing poems", "memorizing poetry", "reciting poems", and "reciting poetry" to return any results in Google Trends. Apparently those topics are just not that much on the mind of most search engine users.
Here are the results for those terms in Ngram Viewer (books). http://tinyurl.com/pbsr3ge They are intriguing.
From 1910-1933 there was a significant and rising interest in memorizing poetry. There was a sharp drop in interest from the peak in 1933 to 1945 followed by a slow decline from 1945 to 1972. There has been essentially a low flat line of interest since 1972 to the present (2008) at about 10% the level of interest in 1933.
The results for reciting poetry and reciting poems is different. There was rising interest in reciting poetry from 1910-1933, peaking in 1933. There was a six year marginal decline in interest to 1939. But from 1940-1990, there has been a steady interest in reciting poetry at a level about ten times greater than memorizing poetry. From 1990 to 2008 there was a 20% increase in interest in reciting poetry.
Results - Reading and writing poetry
Finally, I was interested in the relationship between reading and writing poetry over time. I compared interest in "reading poetry" with interest in
"writing poetry" in Ngram Viewer 1900-2008. The results are here: http://tinyurl.com/m5p54dz. The Trends results are here: http://tinyurl.com/l35nhsr.
Among the clerisy (Ngram Viewer), the interest in reading poetry has been low and steady for the entire time period, with a flat line since circa 1975. In contrast, intriguingly, the interest in writing poetry has steadily increased since 1960, reaching a peak in 1990 but remaining close to the peak level till 2001. From 2001 onwards there has been a modest decline. The striking thing is the disconnect between the amount of interest in reading poetry versus the amount of interest in writing poetry. It is not a recipe for commercial success. The interest in reading poetry has been about 20% of the interest in writing poetry since 1970. Put differently, for every one person interested in reading poetry, there are five people interested in writing it.
Looking at the results in Trends (the general population), there is a steady decline in searches on "writing poetry" and "reading poetry" since 2004 to the current month. Not as dramatically as with Ngram Viewer but just as consistently, the numbers searching on "writing poetry" are about 60% higher than those interested in "reading poetry".
Interpretation
Though many academic researchers are now using both Trends and Ngram, I think it is still sensible to maintain caution as to how meaningful a tool they might be. Tim Harford has a good article, Big Data: Are We Making a Big Mistake? which outlines some of the concerns. With that caveat:
It appears that there is a long term decline in interest in poetry of between 25-80% depending on the particular terminology and the particular tool used.
The high points of interest in poetry tended to be in the 1930s and then again in the 1960s.
It appears that there is a variance in interest in the form of poetry: the clerisy are more interested in poetry collections.
In contrast, the population at large are more interested in anthologies.
It appears that people who write books have had a declining interest in poetry of about 40% since circa 1965.
The general populace has displayed an even greater declining interest, falling 80% from 2004 to EOY 2013
Despite the sharp drop in interest in poetry overall, the interest in poetry for children (while only a small fraction) is steady (but at a much lower rate than in the past).
The decline in children's poetry mirrors that of the overall decline in interest in poetry suggesting that the issue is one of how the populace views poetry overall, versus something that is unique to children's literature.
For people interested in children's poetry, there is a marked preference for anthologies over collections, even if the overall interest in poetry is declining.
Memorizing poetry seems to be a shadow of its former self.
On the other hand, there is a long term sustained interest in reciting poetry.
Far more people are interested in writing poetry than are interested in reading poetry. Yikes.
Make of all that what you will.
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Received on Mon 14 Apr 2014 12:03:59 PM CDT
Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2014 13:03:59 -0400
Still trying to get some additional empirical perspective and insight on the topic of children and poetry. One of my perennial concerns is the extent to which passion and conviction can overtake perspective and objectivity. Too often we see what we want to see: this a general phenomenon, not restricted to children's literature by any means. Cognitive bias (seeing only affirming information to a predicate assumption) and the Semmelweiss reflex
(incapacity to comprehend information inconsistent with predicate assumptions) are common to everyone. In children's literature there are particular risks. The values, goals and interests of adult readers are distinctly different from those of children. What appeals to adults is not the same as that which appeals to children (as an illustration between what adults like and what children like, see the recommended poetry/verse books in this discussion versus the most popular circulating poetry/verse books provided by Crystal B.). In addition, the values, goals and interests of different adult groups (parents, teachers, librarians, issue advocates, pedagogical researchers, authors and publicists, etc. ) are inconsistent
(and often in conflict) with one another as well as being different from those of children. Further, reading is quite distinctively personal and contextual, i.e. there are enormous variances by SES, physical location
(urban, suburban, rural), personal circumstance, etc.
Localism, individualism, confirmation bias and Semmelwiess reflex are all factors contributing to the 90% failure rate seen by the DOE when rigorously testing educational policies that have been demonstrated to work locally but then can't be replicated under neutral conditions. Distinguishing the empirical "is" from the subjective "ought to be" can be challenging.
To that end, I was wondering about how the general public engage with poetry reading and how and in what ways has that changed over time? As already discussed, we know that only about 7% of the population read poetry at all and only 3% read poetry regularly. But what about trends over time? Are we reading less poetry or are we as interested in children's poetry as in the past? I used Google Trends and Google Ngram Viewer to try and get at some answers.
Google Trends was released in 2005 (the earliest data is 2004) and tracks the relative frequency of a search term compared to all searches (in other words it is normalized). It allows you to compare up to five terms to one another and to view trends over time up to the present month. Google Trends captures the vox populi to a greater extent and consequently is more subject to the vernacular than Ngram Viewer. For example, Poems for Kids is a heavily used search term in Trends but doesn't show up in Ngram Viewer for reasons discussed below.
Ngram Viewer allows you to search multiple terms in several million books Google has already scanned. The last data update was in 2008 so you can only search up to that point. Because they are published books, language search terms are somewhat more formal than the vernacular found in Trends. I think of Ngram as more the voice of the clerisy or the cognitive elite whereas Trends is the vox populi. Ngram covers the topics of interest to people who write books to be read by the people who read books; i.e. a smaller section of the overall population. Trends sheds light on the interests of anyone with access to a computer.
These two tools allow some additional insight into what people are interested in (Trends) and talking about (Ngram Viewer).
Results - Children's Poems and Poetry
I restricted Ngram Viewer to 1900-2008 and to the American English corpus
(i.e. books in America) and used a smoothing factor of 2 (to better see trend lines). You may be able to click on the following url to see the results directly. http://tinyurl.com/lmec73d
"Poetry for children" and "Poems for children" follow substantially the same trend lines. "Poems for kids" and "Poetry for kids" occur too infrequently in Ngram Viewer to return a result.
There was a sharp rise in interest in children's poetry starting in the late teens and early twenties, rising to a peak in 1932. This was followed by a sharp drop with the approach of WWII and then a plateau through to 1965. Interest rose again to a secondary peak in 1970 followed by a long slow decline since then to 2008. Interest level today (based on Ngram Viewer) is about 25% of what it was in the early 1930s and 45% of what it was in 1970.
So are the clerisy as focused on poetry for children and poems for children as they were in the past? Regrettably, the evidence indicates that there is quite a substantial drop in book-based discussion of poetry for children.
What about what the general public is interested in (compared to authors of books)? I tried several terms. YA poetry is hardly referenced at all (it is flat lined at 0 through till late 2013 when there is a spike). "Poems for kids" and "Poems for children" are the search terms with the highest relative hits followed by "Poetry for kids" and "Poetry for children".
"Poetry for children" shows continued decline from 2004 to Present, consistent with Ngram. The same is true for "Poems for children" and
"Poetry for kids" but at a slightly higher search frequency. The results are here: http://tinyurl.com/pc8hkbv
Interestingly, in late 2009 there is a large surge in interest in "Poems for kids", peaking in mid-2010. "Poems for kids" is searched more than twice as often as the next highest search term "Poems for children". By March 2014 it has declined 75% in absolute terms but is still the preferred search term by nearly a factor of three.
To get a relative sense of interest, I compared the most popular search term
("Poems for kids") with some basic canonical texts. "Bible" swamps the lines; it is searched orders of magnitude more often. Even "Harry Potter" shows up in searches some five or six times as often as "Poems for kids". Winnie the Pooh is searched three or four times as often as "Poems for kids". Little House on the Prairie is the closest comparable I found in terms of frequency of search for "Poems for kids". http://tinyurl.com/lhgzarf
I also looked at the simple category "Poems" (http://tinyurl.com/nqw2v82). While searched far more often than "Poems for kids", it also shows a continuing decline in popular interest since 2004, March 2014 being about 25% of the high in May 2004.
Finally, I did a search for "Poems" and "Poetry"
(http://tinyurl.com/ljalhzz) in Ngram Viewer. Peaks in the early 1930s and then again in the mid-1960s a steady decline since then of about 30%.
Results - Poetry Collections and Poetry Anthologies
I did a similar exercise for "Poetry Collections", "Poetry Anthologies",
"Children's Poetry Collections", "Children's Poetry Anthologies" to get a sense if there were some changes in interest over time. As a bookseller, anthologies tend to be much more popular than collections but what is the clerisy and the general public interested in?
Comparing the broad categories of "Poetry Collections" and "Poetry Anthologies" (http://tinyurl.com/mjosmkl), there is indeed a shift in interest in the more cerebral part of the market (authors of books). In Ngram Viewer (books), there was about an equal discussion of poetry anthologies and poetry collections up to about 1970. In 1970 Poetry Collections took off and are now discussed three times as often as Poetry Anthologies. There is also an increasing interest in poetry as discussed by authors with poetry collections discussed at six times the rate in 2008 as in 1970 and poetry anthologies nearly twice as much. So while there is a general decline (in Ngram) in interest in "Poems" and "Poetry", there is an increasing interest in "Anthologies" and "Collections" perhaps reflecting an increasing specialization of interest.
Very interestingly, it is completely a different matter for "Children's Poetry Collections" and "Children's Poetry Anthologies"
(http://tinyurl.com/jwovmsx). "Children's poetry collections" are virtually undiscussed in Ngram Viewer but anthologies have some pretty steady discussion since 1945. There are peaks in 1953, in 1983 and in 2000 with ebbs and flows in between.
If you look at the trends in searches, there is a somewhat different story than in Ngram Viewer (http://tinyurl.com/lscth5c). People search for poetry anthologies at about twice the rate as they do collections. And in March 2014 they are searching for anthologies and collections at about 25% the rate they were in 2004, with a sustained decline between 2004 and 2014.
There were insufficient volume of searches to return Trend results for either "Children's Poetry Collections" or "Children's Poetry Anthologies".
Results - Memorizing and reciting poetry
Some 76% of adult readers report having had to memorize poems as a child. I don't know of any studies linking poetry memorization with adult outcomes but my personal sense is that my own engagement with poetry took a positive and more substantive turn once I was required in high school to memorize large chunks of Shakespeare and poetry for recitation. Nothing like having to memorize something to catalyze a deep engagement with it.
So what are the trends? It is perhaps significant that there are insufficient searches on "memorizing poems", "memorizing poetry", "reciting poems", and "reciting poetry" to return any results in Google Trends. Apparently those topics are just not that much on the mind of most search engine users.
Here are the results for those terms in Ngram Viewer (books). http://tinyurl.com/pbsr3ge They are intriguing.
From 1910-1933 there was a significant and rising interest in memorizing poetry. There was a sharp drop in interest from the peak in 1933 to 1945 followed by a slow decline from 1945 to 1972. There has been essentially a low flat line of interest since 1972 to the present (2008) at about 10% the level of interest in 1933.
The results for reciting poetry and reciting poems is different. There was rising interest in reciting poetry from 1910-1933, peaking in 1933. There was a six year marginal decline in interest to 1939. But from 1940-1990, there has been a steady interest in reciting poetry at a level about ten times greater than memorizing poetry. From 1990 to 2008 there was a 20% increase in interest in reciting poetry.
Results - Reading and writing poetry
Finally, I was interested in the relationship between reading and writing poetry over time. I compared interest in "reading poetry" with interest in
"writing poetry" in Ngram Viewer 1900-2008. The results are here: http://tinyurl.com/m5p54dz. The Trends results are here: http://tinyurl.com/l35nhsr.
Among the clerisy (Ngram Viewer), the interest in reading poetry has been low and steady for the entire time period, with a flat line since circa 1975. In contrast, intriguingly, the interest in writing poetry has steadily increased since 1960, reaching a peak in 1990 but remaining close to the peak level till 2001. From 2001 onwards there has been a modest decline. The striking thing is the disconnect between the amount of interest in reading poetry versus the amount of interest in writing poetry. It is not a recipe for commercial success. The interest in reading poetry has been about 20% of the interest in writing poetry since 1970. Put differently, for every one person interested in reading poetry, there are five people interested in writing it.
Looking at the results in Trends (the general population), there is a steady decline in searches on "writing poetry" and "reading poetry" since 2004 to the current month. Not as dramatically as with Ngram Viewer but just as consistently, the numbers searching on "writing poetry" are about 60% higher than those interested in "reading poetry".
Interpretation
Though many academic researchers are now using both Trends and Ngram, I think it is still sensible to maintain caution as to how meaningful a tool they might be. Tim Harford has a good article, Big Data: Are We Making a Big Mistake? which outlines some of the concerns. With that caveat:
It appears that there is a long term decline in interest in poetry of between 25-80% depending on the particular terminology and the particular tool used.
The high points of interest in poetry tended to be in the 1930s and then again in the 1960s.
It appears that there is a variance in interest in the form of poetry: the clerisy are more interested in poetry collections.
In contrast, the population at large are more interested in anthologies.
It appears that people who write books have had a declining interest in poetry of about 40% since circa 1965.
The general populace has displayed an even greater declining interest, falling 80% from 2004 to EOY 2013
Despite the sharp drop in interest in poetry overall, the interest in poetry for children (while only a small fraction) is steady (but at a much lower rate than in the past).
The decline in children's poetry mirrors that of the overall decline in interest in poetry suggesting that the issue is one of how the populace views poetry overall, versus something that is unique to children's literature.
For people interested in children's poetry, there is a marked preference for anthologies over collections, even if the overall interest in poetry is declining.
Memorizing poetry seems to be a shadow of its former self.
On the other hand, there is a long term sustained interest in reciting poetry.
Far more people are interested in writing poetry than are interested in reading poetry. Yikes.
Make of all that what you will.
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Received on Mon 14 Apr 2014 12:03:59 PM CDT
