In this lecture (actually during the following lectures) I developed a small utility script for counting characters, lines, and words in a text file, much like the built-in Unix (and Mac) program "wc" does. But I also made it count stanzas of a poem as well (delimited by blank lines).

The test data is from three poems:

1. “Jabberwocky,” a famous nonsense poem that appears in Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll (1871).
2. “Sestina,” an example of the poetry form of the same name that constrains the final words of each line to follow a particular permutation, by Elizabeth Bishop (1965).
3. “The Road Not Taken,” a well known poem from the collection Mountain Interval by Robert Frost (1916).