Musiphron's Rating of Poets

In 1746, Musiphron (Gk. "Thinker about poets") rated 20 poets on 8 aspects of poetic performance together with a 9th overall rating. His ratings are shown below. He used a 20 category rating scale, which seems to have been typical at the time. 20 corresponded to god-level performance. 19 corresponded to the highest possible human performance, which has yet to be observed. So the operational range of the scale is 1-18. The poets are listed in the order of their measures when the same rating scale structure is applied to all 9 items. We see that Shakespeare has the worst fit, i.e., the most uneven performance across items.

Musiphron's use of rating scale categories, however, is idiosyncratic. To the upper right is shown the frequency of category use by item. A recoding of categories into 4 levels is also suggested. With Musiphron's original use of 10 different categories, the person separation reliability was .63. Reduced to just 4 category levels, it is almost the same at .61! Poets whose rank order changes by more than 2 positions are flagged with "-" and "+" in the Table.

Among the items, Final Estimate has the smallest mean-square, 0.32, in the original analysis, indicating that it contributes less than one-third of an item's worth of new information.

Items:
1. Critical Disposition (Ordonnance)
2. Emotional Disposition (Pathetic Ordonnance)
3. Dramatic Expression
4. Incidental Expression
5. Taste
6. Coloring
7. Versification
8. Moral
9. Final Estimate

                  Ratings                     INFIT With 4

POET         1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 MEASURE MNSQ Levels

Homer       18 17 18 15 16 16 18 17 18  1.37  1.54  1   

Milton      17 15 15 17 18 18 17 18 17  1.26   .90  1   

Virgil      17 16 10 17 18 17 17 17 16   .77  1.51  4   

Molière     15 17 17 17 15 16    16 14   .68   .48  5  

Cervantes   17 17 15 17 12 16    16 14   .56   .82  6   

Sophocles   18 16 15 15 16 14    16 13   .52   .55  9-  

Pope        16 17 12 17 16 15 15 17 13   .50   .34  7   

Shakespeare  0 18 18 18 10 17 10 18 18   .47  4.15  3+  

Corneille   15 16 16 16 16 14 12 16 14   .41   .58 14-  

Racine      17 16 15 15 17 13 12 15 13   .36   .73 11   

Boileau     18 16 12 14 17 14 13 16 12   .34   .67 12   

Euripides   15 16 14 17 13 14    15 12   .31   .35 16-  

Spencer      8 15 10 16 17 17 17 17 14   .31  1.51  7+  

Horace      12 12 10 16 17 17 16 14 13   .23   .55 14   

Pindar      10 10    17 17 16    17 13   .20  1.25 10+  

Tasso       17 14 14 13 12 13 16 13 12   .16   .74 20-  

Terence     18 12 10 12 17 14    16 10   .14  1.03 13+  

Dante       12 15  8 17 12 15 14 14 13   .09   .45 18   

Ariosto      0 15 10 15 14 15 16 10 13   .05   .71 18   

Lucretius   14  5    17 17 14 16  0 10  -.03  1.91 17+  

 

Ratings of 0 have been regarded as misprints for 10.

The most aberrant item was "1. Critical Disposition". The 18 given to Terence on this item was ignored when Musiphron gave Terence the very low Final Estimate of 10.

Already in 1746 the hazards associated with using raters and rating scales are evident.

Category Item Rating Count      

Label    1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Level

  5        1                 1  

  6                             

  7                             

  8      1   1               1  

  9                             

 10      3 1 5   1   1 2 2   1  

 11                             

 12      2 2 2 1 3   2   3   1  

 13            1 1 2 1 1 7   1  

 14      1 1 2 1 1 6 1 2 4   1  

 15      3 4 4 4 1 3 1 2     2  

 16      1 6 1 3 4 4 4 6 1   2  

 17      5 4 1 9 7 4 3 5 1   3  

 18      4 1 2 1 2 1 1 2 2   4  

Musiphron's Rating of Poets Dodsley R. … Rasch Measurement Transactions, 1999, 13:2 p. 694

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