Robot Poet

Final Project for EN127 exploring differences in GPT-2 generated text from a variety of trained models from different modernist poets.

Henry Kaufman

INTRODUCTION

In the last few years, artificial intelligence and machine learning have begun to attract a lot of attention across a variety of industries, as new models have emerged allowing for greater applications beyond traditional usages. Even in the last year alone, multiple, incredibly powerful models have been released allowing many to move beyond the traditional, technical domains of natural language processing, and into more abstract, artistic representations of machine learning.

For the final project, I was interested in exploring a non-traditional application of natural language processing, specifically in understanding differences in generated text fragments trained on unique models that use a modernist poet’s poems as training data. By using OpenAI’s public GPT-2 model, a transformer-based language model trained on 1.5 billion parameters with 8 million web pages and over 40 gigabytes of Internet text, I was able to advantageously use its pre-trained nature and simply feed in the poet-grouped texts as additional fine-tuning data. Ultimately, this produced some fascinating outputs, outputs that both reflect and expose new ideas that fundamentally help define the many roles that modern poetry plays in our society.

Robert Frost

1874 – 1963

Poem #1

I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I am done
With the haying now or be forever silent.
The time was autumn
I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
I am dragged to this by what measure I lag?
What measure you really ask
I am done
I am questioned in that I say
I don't know where I am right now
I am not in a hurry to say when.
“I should be soon.”

GENERATION PREFIX: “I am”

Poem #2

The city had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load
The heads
Of the young hemlock trees I should lose
The Latin something
I picked up off the straw-dust covered floor.
Not bones
The tender fir of autumn,
A seed in its place, and seem not to die,
Summer
The ill-fitted window rattled.
The door was still because I held it shut
While I thought
The door was Deleuze—he’s been—
And I was
Waiting

GENERATION PREFIX: “The”

Reflection

Robert Frost traditionally celebrated a simplistic, rural lifestyle, a characteristic that manifests itself as an underlying theme in the result of the generated text. Furthermore, the two poems share elements of self-realization as the narrator of each recognizes their appreciation towards the intrinsic purpose the simplistic lifestyle provides.

Sylvia Plath

1932 – 1963

Poem #1

The Fascisto
Flakes from his lips.
The phone wars. And the B-52s, for that matter.
Scorched to the
The bald, white tumuli of your eyes.
A blue sky out of the Oresteia
The pink roses, the theatrical
Shem—I’m finally through.
The morrow are coming now, they are deadly.
There is a charge
For the eyeing of
The stink of wars and plagues.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—
The torpor of a Greek necessity.
The tin-white of morning.
The light burns blue.
Waxy stalactites
Drip and thicken.

PREFIX: “The”

Poem #2

For a year,
Seven years,
I crawl like an ant in mourning
Over the weedy acres of your brow
In my Victorian nightgown.
Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.
Thighs on the blue sky’s ridgepole.
Waist down, you may
A myrrh, drinking my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—
A cake of soap,
Scrutable bones
Unimaginable. You float near
As keeled ice-mount
I must die,
All by myself in terror.
So I said I am going to Mars.

PREFIX: None

Reflection

Sylvia Plath admired destructive and death-related thoughts as themes in many of her poems, an attribute found in the result of the generated text. These underlying themes provide a basis for the model to establish both dark, detached thoughts while still maintaining a transformative shift in the poem represented through the narrarator's experience of self in contrast to society itself.

Wallace Stevens

1879 – 1955

Poem #1

The sea of spuming thought foists up again
The moon is creeping up.
The sun is...
The moon is creeping up.
The sun is...
In the midst of sleep?
In the moonlight
I met Berserk.
The misery of night has been fresh a long time
Therefore, music, then, is feeling oneself.
The beauty and the nothing
Be not two things.
The moon is creeping up.
The sun is
Of the moonlight
On the bushy plain.

GENERATION PREFIX: None

Poem #2

I am the personal. Artistic universe is
Formal, in that we believe what we hear.
I am a soul,
You must know.
I am a yeoman, as such fellows go.
I know no magic trees.
I am your mother,
As your blue-shadowed silk scrawls
I am
A person, breathing frost
To those who watch.
Their faces will be chilling
I am the personal, dwighted, rage-beast, crackling skull-of—
your mother
As your blue-shadowed silk plunges.
I am a sailor on a foreign land.
I know the coast
And the sky.
I am the personal.
Your world is you. I am my world
You ten-foot poet.

GENERATION PREFIX: “I am”

Reflection

Wallace Stevens carefully plays with diction and creates a measured appreciation towards both the fantasies of imagination and structures of reality, both of which present themselves in the result of the generated text. Furthermore, similar themes of the cyclical aspects of the natural world can be found in both the repetitive pieces in the first poem and the contemplative consideration towards one' placement on Earth.

T.S. Eliot

1888 – 1965

Poem #1

Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith,
The house of
Tenants of the house,
Except for a slight sensation of being
In the juvescence of the year
Came Christ the tiger
But we who were living are now dying
With a little patience
Here
Guides us by shadow
Of ailed and neglected houses;
You are invulnerable, you have no Achilles' heel.
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I,
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not
In fractured atoms, where the sun beats, and the bones of cattle cry
Compelled my imagination many days,
Many days and many hours:
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

GENERATION PREFIX: None

Poem #2

The woman, red in the face of the sun,
The border of her dress
Tries to pick at
The smoke coming down
From the window.
The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard.
The world gives up.
The walls
Of memory
Are bruised and confused
The dead tree carries
The dead cricket. No sound of
The notion of some infinitely gentle,
The point is, it won’t be for
The woman in the square, with one bold stare,
The knowledge that lurks above the waters.
The eye and the back of the hand
Are veiled.
The record begins
With a new beginning.

GENERATION PREFIX: “The”

Reflection

T.S. Eliot traditionally developed themes that marked a stark divergence from previous 19th-century poetry, and such phrases representative of these ideas can be found in the result of the generated text. In both of the generated poems, Eliot creates a universal experience that connects the reader through the cyclical death and rebirth of the narrator.

William Carlos Williams

1883 – 1963

Poem #1

flourishes
tied, released, seem hardly flowers alone
but
to the north past a house
a woman in blue!
the wisest man
the man who
lost his wife and with
looms the artist figure of
the farmer.
from
the west to
you see
the man
the farmer
by
the fire.

GENERATION PREFIX: None

Poem #2

I seem to recall you to be lonely,
I was born to be lonely.
I looked up
into the man’s half
averted face
I felt a hand on my shoulders
The man turns and there—
I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely.

GENERATION PREFIX: “I”

Reflection

Many of Williams poems share distinct, stylistically representative elements that ultimately manifest themselves in the result of the generated text. His traditional structure and denial of capitalization with short, pungent lines appear in both of the poems where the diction might remain simple, yet the enjambment of lines provides the reader with a greater, more contemplative approach towards understanding representative themes in these poems.

CONCLUSION

The role that modern poetry plays in society extends far beyond the tangible limitations placed on the poet, where instead of creating a shared experience through specific experiences described through word choice, the poet extends their presence into the reader’s allowing for a greater internal dialogue to manifest. This individualistic aspect of modernist poetry marks a break from previous eras of poetry, placing a clear and distinct role onto the reader instead of just the poet themselves, fundamentally shifting the focus and attention to the contemplative nature of the words, inherently shared, on the page.

Throughout many of the poems we read this semester, a transparent, dueling role seems to be placed upon the reader, both as a direct interpreter of the poet’s text but also as an extension beyond the text into relating one’s internal emotions and experiences into the experience of interpreting the prose. Instead of a simply descriptive attribution of an experience through a weightless medium, words, the modern poet pulls at the engagement of the reader, inviting them into a pre-ordained dance, where the reader engages by following the underlying, universal themes set forth by the author. The fundamental requirement for modernist poetry to place that seemingly invisible weight upon the reader, ultimately allows for a pivotal appreciation towards modern poetry to be established, as the reader no longer plays a passive role in the consumption of the poem, but rather follows the dance, actively transitioning between a leading and following role.

The application of using machine learning and natural language processing to develop complex models trained on poems from specific modernist poets further extends the intrinsically individualistic aspect of the role that modern poetry plays in society. By designing models that were representative of the style and prose of different modernist poets, one is able to further connect with the universal, underlying themes shared across modernist poetry, even appreciating how that might be represented in a non-humanistic, artificially-generated form.