Virtual Muse: Experiments in Computer Poetry
In this engaging, accessible memoir, Charles Hartman shows how computer programming has helped him probe poetry’s aesthetic possibilities. He discusses the nature of poetry itself and his experiences with primitive computer-generated poetry programs and — illustrated with sample computer-produced verses — traces the development of more advanced hardware and software.
Hartman tells us a lucid minimum about what programs do, in the course of setting before us much that we may never have suspected about the inner secrets of poetry. It’s a rich and rewarding book.
Hugh Kenner
While it’s the brainy, chess-playing computer that steals national headlines, Hartman is here to tell us that there are other machines (and human instigators) busy at work on metrical beauty and imagery. Writing in a voice that, thankfully, is neither geeky nor zealous, Hartman . . . lays out the basics of both programming and versifying, then introduces several programs he and colleagues . . . have come up with to produce poetry. . . . While such tracking captures the logical side of the writing process, it cannot touch the emotional. . . . [I]t is the human, notes Hartman in the cases explicated here, who tells the machine how and when to create. . . . This exploration will fascinate readers curious about what makes poetry, and how.
Publishers Weekly
In this fascinating book, Hartman explores what he has learned of human poetry by attempting to create computer programs and, further, by attempting to write a simple poem–a dialogue of mind and body–with a computer as compositional partner . . . An absorbing, authoritative, and astonishingly accessible book.
Booklist