Method
For the distance reading part, my partner and I asked our computer science group to compare “The Lesser Evil” by George Orwell to the rest of his poems. We asked them to compare the length of the poems and check if any of his other poems included themes of religion or faith, similar to what was mentioned in “The Lesser Evil.” Our aim was to understand the differences in length and thematic emphasis among Orwell’s poems to see how much importance he placed on conveying his messages in each piece. We noticed that Orwell’s poems were all significantly different in length and content, which got our interest. This observation led us to form our research question, understanding Orwell’s views on faith and religion. We wanted to explore how Orwell uses these themes in “The Lesser Evil” and whether similar themes appear in his other works. By analyzing the lengths and religious content of his poems, we aimed to gain deeper insights into Orwell’s literary techniques and thematic priorities. Furthermore, this investigation was crucial for our final project, because before we created any questions, me and my partner were looking at George Orwell poems to see if we could use it for our final project and noticed all George Orwell poems were different in length and what they meant, so we had to chose it.
After asking our computer science group to look at the length differences, also to find out if any other poems included religion or faith, if they can find out the themes, and if any poems used a lot of similar words. But they let me and my partner know that they can show us the differences in length of all the poems and how often the same word comes out in a poem, but their coding system was not going to be able to do most of the things we sought to be important for the final, so the questions we wanted answered were not possible to answer.
Results
The only information we got from them was how long all the poems were, how many words were used in each stanza and the average length for each sentence. We wanted to see if religion showed up in any other poems by George Orwell but we didn’t get any information about it. This didn’t surprise me very much because when I was in high school I use to have a coding class and it only allowed us to see repeated words, how long essays or poems were, and when it was published if it had dates on it.
But from the information my group received we found out that George Orwell’s poems are all very different; some could have one stanza while others could have more than 10. This was interesting to find out because one of our questions was to figure out the length of all the poems and after making a graph of the information given to us we could see that George Orwell liked keeping his poems short. This is interesting because once I read “The Lesser Evil” I believed that George Orwell made poems that were not very short, and that always led to someone having to make a choice between either evil or good. Furthermore, the reason we wanted to see the differences in length was because we wanted to see if the author Orwell has poems that are long and have emphasis on a certain topic. We wanted to find out if Orwell had poems like “The Lesser Evil” where it tells a story of a man choosing to change after dealing with a prostitute, he chose to go to church after realizing how church might not be great anymore, choosing something worse isn’t better. This was the reason we chose our research question, which is Orwell’s view on faith and religion. He believes it isn’t good but it’s an evil that isn’t as worse as other evil things to do. By seeing the length of his other poems we can see if he has other poems that dive deep into a certain idea. On the other hand, we can also see if he has short poems that are straight to the point and focus on just one thing to get across to the audience. But what I learned from this distance reading was that Orwell is an author who can give his audience a very good detailed poem that has a lot of interesting views, such as he did in “The Lesser Evil” but could also make poems that are short and concise with only just one stanza. This showed me that it’s very important how long a poem is because the audience could either get more from a longer poem that has a lot of detail, but they could also get the same in a short poem that is clear and concise, but an audience could also find a longer poem better, it all comes down to preference. This distance reading showed me how an author writes for multiple audiences, which is the reason we saw how some poems are very short with just one stanza and there are other poems with longer stances and a lot of stanzas.