  Due to its semantic succinctness and novelty of expression, poetry is a great
test bed for semantic change analysis. However, so far there is a scarcity of
large diachronic corpora. Here, we provide a large corpus of German poetry
which consists of about 75k poems with more than 11 million tokens, with poems
ranging from the 16th to early 20th century. We then track semantic change in
this corpus by investigating the rise of tropes (`love is magic') over time and
detecting change points of meaning, which we find to occur particularly within
the German Romantic period. Additionally, through self-similarity, we
reconstruct literary periods and find evidence that the law of linear semantic
change also applies to poetry.
