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compression measure

Concept
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A metric evaluating the degree of linguistic or thematic compression in a poem

Detailed Definition
Compression measure evaluates how much meaning, emotion, or imagery a poem conveys relative to its word count; it quantifies poetic economy by assessing the ratio of implied or layered content to explicit text, highlighting the poet’s ability to suggest more than is stated through metaphor, allusion, or syntactic tightness.
Example
Example in poetry:
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 compresses love, time, and immortality into 14 lines; In “Ozymandias,” Shelley compresses empire, hubris, and ruin into 14 lines; In “This Is Just To Say,” Williams compresses apology, desire, and guilt into 12 short lines; In “Fog,” Sandburg compresses a complex image into six words: “The fog comes / on little cat feet.”
Additional Notes
Compression measure: Evaluates how effectively a poet condenses complex feelings or ideas into limited text; linked to compactness.
Also Known As
Compression ratio Condensation measure Brevity index
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