A Fourteenth Way of Looking at a Blackbird

After watching the Biden/Palin debate, I got online to see what the media were reporting because, you know, what we think matters far less than the narrative the media promulgates. But I got sidetracked by a cool little program at Wordle. You paste a bunch of words into a field and out pops a "word cloud," such as the one I posted using Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." Naturally people had pasted in the words of Biden and Palin to see what each emphasized, and the results were interesting, and I suppose if you have a mind to, you can search and find those word clouds, or you can make your own, because this post isn't about the vice presidential debate.

Wordle takes the words you paste in and sizes them according to their frequency. It turns out that Biden's most-used words were "John McCain." Palin has great love for "also." (Common words such as "the" and "an" are deleted.) And not surprisingly, Stevens' favorite word in his blackbird poem is "blackbird," with "blackbirds" a bit further down the list.

You can cheat, too. Instead of using actual sentences, you can simply type in random words, repeating the ones you want larger. But that gives me moral qualms; it's the behavior of a cad, a rogue, of someone you nod at as you pat your wallet.