🌰 random poetry generator

As mentioned in 🛠️ poetry generator, I’ve been exploring different ways of generating text. The following interactive art piece allows you to select your own rules for how poetry should be structured, and then generate a poem of your own! Give it a try and let me know how it goes.

How it works

Currently the system is as follows:

1. I have a list of words categorized by part of speech
2. I have a mapping of parts of speech to other parts of speech (e.g. “a noun can be followed by an adverb or a verb”)
3. For each line of poetry, the system¹:
   1. picks a random starting word
   2. based on the part of speech of that word, it picks a random follow-up part of speech (e.g. “the first word was a noun, let’s find an adverb next”)
   3. based on the selected part of speech, pick a random next word
   4. go back to step 2 until the line is over

Soon, I’d like to surface different controls on this page to allow you to surface better algorithms than the one above. But for now, I wanted to put this up and get feedback. Let me know what you think!

Change the settings below and generate some poetry!

Number of lines in poem:
Maximum number of words in a line:

Advanced Settings:

Modify the word bank

I've created a list of potential words myself, but here you can change the words entirely as desired

Part of speech relationships

The algorithm picks words based on parts of speech as shown by the table below. (e.g. an adverb can be followed by another adverb or a verb, etc). You can add and remove parts of speech from the table below and then hit generate to change how the algorithm picks words. For examples for the parts of speech, see here

Poetry:

Fill out the form above to see your poem

Like what you made? Send Me Your Poem or tweet at me

< back to advanced settings

Updates

• 1 July 2022: New settings! You can now create your own word dictionary
• 30 Jun 2022: Moved this from the main 🛠️ poetry generator page to this page to make room for other types of poetry generators.

1. You can see the javascript code itself here ↩

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Every post on this blog is a work in progress. Phrasing may be less than ideal, ideas may not yet be fully thought through. Thank you for watching me grow.