I had recently heard about apps for writing poetry and was intrigued. Can computers really create poems? Let me consider for a moment what poetry actually is. It is surely a difficult concept to pin down, but better minds than mine have had a go. William Wordsworth, who wrote quite a few poems himself, describes poetry thus (in the second edition of his Lyrical Ballads, published in 1802):
“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”
According to later writer, Matthew Arnold, in his Essays in Criticism from 1888, “genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.”
Now, it is probably even harder to define the “soul” than it is to define poetry, but I’m pretty sure computers don’t have one. Nor, I think, do they have emotions. Therefore, I suspect it is going to be quite a challenge for a machine to create a poem.
Other aspects of poetry might be easier, however. Poetry can also be thought of as “word music”. We often talk of “beats” in lines of poetry; poems can be constructed to have regular rhythms, like a constant drum beat in a piece of music. Poems can also put particular emphasis on using words and word combinations with interesting or attractive sounds. Perhaps machines can be programmed to do this. Another aspect of poetry is that it may cause an emotional response in the reader. This does not necessarily depend upon it being created from the emotional feelings of the composer. Even randomly generated words could possibly do this, depending on who is reading it. So, again, the machine might stand a chance with this.
Well, we could go on for pages discussing the nature of poetry, as many writers and critics have, but let us get to the evidence. I have used a poetry app. I ventured onto poem-generator.org.uk and gave it a go. You get a large choice of verse forms, from Haiku to one I hadn’t heard of. I decided not to make things too easy for it and chose rhyming couplets – not impossibly tricky for the human writer, but would the machine manage it? After you have chosen your structure there is a series of questions asking you to input some characters, nouns, adjectives, an animal (not sure why) and some verbs. It will suggest things or randomly generate all the vocabulary if you are stuck for any ideas. And here is what we came up with. I should say that you can tweak it as much as you like once it has been generated, but I thought you should have the opportunity to read it in its most pure form:
The Boy and the Iris
See the rippling of the Boy,
I think he’s angry at the foye.
He finds it hard to see the tree,
Overshadowed by the enormous cree.
Who is that sparkling near the grass?
I think she’d like to eat the underpass.
She is but a cold Iris,
Admired as she sits upon a pyrus.
Her bright car is just a moon,
It needs no gas, it runs on midafternoon.
She’s not alone she brings a sunset,
a pet cat, and lots of barrette.
The cat likes to chase a daisy,
Especially one that’s in the coglianese.
The Boy shudders at the sinister lamp
He want to leave but she wants the steenkamp.
There. How was that? If you reckon that’s the best poem on this website, I should probably never write anything again. Firstly, there are some odd words in it. These were not words I chose. That is not to say that unusual, or even made-up words are never found in poetry, because they can be, but you really can’t eat an underpass. Even if it were metaphorical, I still don’t see that eating an underpass works…or am I wrong? I had to look up “barrette”. Apparently this is a type of hair clip. Hmmm. I’m unsure about what “coglianese” could be, but it sounds like a pasta dish. Here, it seems, it is garnished with daisies. Steenkamp is apparently a surname, but what could it mean in this context? Perhaps it’s a new word for cat food – I presume the “she” refers to the cat?
So, what do you think? Does this qualify as poetry? It works on one level, because it did in fact result in an emotional response. It made me chuckle.