Call for papers

The deadline for submissions is 28 February 2026.

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Themed issue description

As a "measured speech", poetry shaped the origins of modern literary theory and quantitative approaches to textual data. One of the earliest quantitative traditions in the humanities emerged from the study of verse in the works of formalists and structuralists. Over time, the study of poetics (“meaning”) and the study of prosody (“form”) diverged, reflecting the broader split between literary studies and linguistics. This division was not only conceptual but also methodological: counting syllables and stresses was largely left to linguists and phonologists. Modern computational humanities offer a vantage point from which to reconnect various traditions of poetry study, restoring form to meaning and meaning to form.

In this Themed Issue, we invite diverse contributions in the field of "computational poetics"—the application of computational methods to the study of poetic texts and poetic discourse that maintains a focus on the integral dimensions of poetic speech: meter, rhyme, and stanza. Poetic form is critically important for scholarship and literary history, as it establishes long-term continuities that extend far beyond a single human lifespan and persist across literary traditions and languages. Form also challenges our methods: most language models and natural language processing pipelines struggle with the peculiarities and regularities of poetic speech and syntax. This perplexity of poetry demands domain-specific craftsmanship in textual modeling and analysis to avoid systematic errors and biases embedded in large-scale data.

This issue seeks to present computational poetics in its topical, chronological, linguistic, and methodological diversity. We welcome original and focused research that leverages computational methods to address questions in the history, theory, and morphology of poetry. We particularly encourage submissions that engage with languages and traditions beyond Europe. Our broad understanding of "poetry" includes verse in oral traditions, popular song lyrics, machine-generated texts, and related forms.

Topics of interest

We invite contributions on topics including, but not limited to:

• The history and evolution of poetic forms
• The diversity and complexity of poetic language and style
• The interaction between meter, language, and meaning
• Formulas, repetition, and regularity in verse
• Poetry cohorts: groups, coteries, and generations
• Networks of poetry production, publishing, and readership
• The canon, popularity, and prestige of poetry
• The spatial and geographical dimensions of poetic language and form
• The cultural and ideological significance of poetic forms
• Data-driven theories and typologies of meter.

Article Types

Authors can choose from several different article types for their contribution to this themed issue - see the Preparing your materials page for the full list of article types available.

If the article type selected is marked as 'by invitation/enquiry only', author should contact the Guest Editors with a pre-submission enquiry.

Submission process

All submissions should be made via the CHR online peer review system. Authors should consult the journal’s Authors instructions prior to submission.

Contacts

If you have questions about this themed issue, please reach out to the Guest Editors:

• Artjoms Šeļa (Institute of Czech Literature, Czech Academy of Sciences, Czechia): sela@ulc.cas.cz
• Natalie M. Houston (University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA): natalie_houston@uml.edu 

For any questions relating to editorial policy or the submission process, please contact the journal’s Editorial Office at chr@cambridge.org.