Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Breadth

What can AI-assisted formal analysis establish about a poem, and what must it leave to a human reader? This article puts the two stanzas of Crockett’s 1884 poem ‘O Heart’s Delight’ — placed as a threshold before ‘Saint Lucy of the Eyes’ in Bog Myrtle and Peat (1895) — through a detailed formal reading: metre, rhyme, rhetorical structure. The results are set against the long-standing verdict attributed to Robert Louis Stevenson on Crockett’s verse, and the article asks whether that verdict has been misread.