Among works, devoted to the quantitative study of style, an approach prevails which can be conventionally called as synchronic. Synchronic approach is aimed at solving various classifi cation problems (including those of attribution), making use of average (mean) values of characteristics, which refl ect the style of the whole creative activity of an author. This approach is based on the assumption that the features of an individual style are not changing during lifetime or vary in time very little, due to which the changes can be disregarded as linguistically irrelevant. This assumption can be tested in experiments, organised within a diachronic approach, whose purpose is to compare linguistic properties of texts, written by the same author at different periods of his life. This paper presents the results of such a diachronic study of the individual style of famous American romantic poet E.A.Poe. The study was aimed at fi nding out whether there were linguistically relevant differences in the style of the poet at various periods of his creative activity and if so, at revealing linguistic markers for the transition from one period to the other.

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