METHODOLOGY

For this project we began by collecting the entirety of Edgar Allan Poe's poetical corpus in order to examine the language used there for signifiers of opening and closing connotations. We started this, firstly, by locating and tagging prepositions that indicated location. For example, the prepositions 'in' 'under' and 'below' would all have been tagged as language indidcating closeness while contraversly, the prepositions 'out' 'above' and 'on' would be marked as signifying openess. Using these as monikers of our reserach we then progressed by looking through the entire corpus word by word and deciding if the other words indicated openess and closeness in a similar fashion. We then searched the results of each individual poem as well as the entire corpus to see if Poe's poetical works mirrored the catch and release pattern of his fictional body, as outlined in our original research question.