  Recent advances in cultural analytics and large-scale computational studies
of art, literature and film often show that long-term change in the features of
artistic works happens gradually. These findings suggest that conservative
forces that shape creative domains might be underestimated. To this end, we
provide the first large-scale formal evidence of the persistent association
between poetic meter and semantics in 18-19th European literatures, using
Czech, German and Russian collections with additional data from English poetry
and early modern Dutch songs. Our study traces this association through a
series of clustering experiments using the abstracted semantic features of
150,000 poems. With the aid of topic modeling we infer semantic features for
individual poems. Texts were also lexically simplified across collections to
increase generalizability and decrease the sparseness of word frequency
distributions. Topics alone enable recognition of the meters in each observed
language, as may be seen from highly robust clustering of same-meter samples
(median Adjusted Rand Index between 0.48 and 1). In addition, this study shows
that the strength of the association between form and meaning tends to decrease
over time. This may reflect a shift in aesthetic conventions between the 18th
and 19th centuries as individual innovation was increasingly favored in
literature. Despite this decline, it remains possible to recognize semantics of
the meters from past or future, which suggests the continuity of semantic
traditions while also revealing the historical variability of conditions across
languages. This paper argues that distinct metrical forms, which are often
copied in a language over centuries, also maintain long-term semantic inertia
in poetry. Our findings, thus, highlight the role of the formal features of
cultural items in influencing the pace and shape of cultural evolution.
