Poetry, perhaps more than any other genre, shows us how important it is to connect with a real human presence.
T.S. Eliot inspecting manuscripts. Undated photograph.(Getty)
The class I am teaching this semester is an undergraduate survey of lyric poetry. It’s a class I enjoy teaching and one I offer whenever I can. Modeled on a course I took as an undergraduate, in which the poet, professor, and painter Peter Sacks brought us all to tears in his full-throated lectures on Milton and Shelley and Bishop, the class begins with some anonymous Middle English lyric poems and does a quick swoop through the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries before concluding with Modernism, mid-century American poetry, and some contemporary work. We read William Shakespeare and John Donne, Lorine Niedecker, and Terrence Hayes. I tell students, most of whom are sophomores and juniors, that I want them to leave the course with a sense—to paraphrase T.S. Eliot—of tradition in their bones. I want them to leave excited to go out and read whatever strikes their fancy, but to do it with a poet’s sense of the long history of poetry in English and a feel for the way poetry reprises older traditions or echoes older verse, sometimes without the poets themselves even knowing it.
This semester, though, I approached the class with an argument in mind: I wanted to show my students how fundamental a sense of real human presence is to what we understand as poetry. I gave the class a new title: “‘This Living Hand’: Lyric Poetry and the Writing ‘I.’” The quoted phrase comes from a fragment by John Keats, a bit of poetry written towards the end of the poet’s short life, before he died of tuberculosis in 1821 at the age of 25. The poem reads as follows:
This living hand, now warm and capableOf earnest grasping, would, if it were coldAnd in the icy silence of the tomb,So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nightsThat thou would wish thine own heart dry of bloodSo in my veins red life might stream again,And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—I hold it towards you.
My students loved this poem: “It’s like the poem is the hand!” one of them said. It’s creepy, morbid, sensual, and in the end, I think, very moving. The poem is indeed the hand held toward the reader in all the warmth and capability the poet possessed while alive. The poem outlasts the poet; it remains an almost physical gesture of connection from him to us.
I picked this poem as an opening gambit for the class because I wanted my students to think through—and I wanted to think through myself—what language is or does, historically and today. As a student and teacher of poetry, and as a poet myself, I’ve never insisted that poetry communicate emotion directly or at all. I am fine with its moments of indirection and its play of surfaces. I know that poetry—language generally—is as likely to conceal a feeling or a self as it is to reveal it. I revel in poetry that is difficult, experimental, elusive, or tricky. And yet the truth remains: We read poetry for the glimmer of a human presence, even if the writer has been hell-bent (as many of the writers I love were) on hiding that presence from us. In general, extending beyond poetry, we read written language because someone has written it for us.
Even a few years ago, this would have seemed like a dumb point to make. Of course writing is written by humans. How else would it exist? But today, as AI programs capable of generating and refining text proliferate and advance, it feels like a suddenly urgent and precarious notion. The fact is that much of the language that surrounds us right now comes not from humans but from LLMs. I cannot overstate how much this disturbs me. Is there an essential, ontological difference between AI-generated and human-generated language? Poetry helps us see that there is.
Throughout the class this term, my students and I have been struck—moved really—by how much human presence there is in the poetry we read, even in some of the oldest verse. We spent almost an entire class session on the famous and much-discussed Middle English lyric that our Norton Anthology prints as follows:
Westron wind, when will thou blow?The small rain down can rain.Christ, that my love were in my arms,And I in my bed again.
How incredible, I want to say, that the feeling of yearning and sleepiness, that the desire for warmth and comfort, that the incredible impatience of the body, cuts through the centuries like a knife here. How incredible that we, readers in our 21st-century places and bodies, reading these words in our books or on our screens, know (or think we know) exactly what this other human being was feeling. Poetry, perhaps more than other forms of writing, is where the writer’s mind and body and world come together to produce some new combination of words about a feeling or experience or thing observed, and it is the medium that transfers that feeling or experience or observation to another human with a mind and a body. If it’s incredible that language has this power to convey, well, the human, it also seems to me incredible that we’re living through a pretty dramatic revolution in what language is and what it means.
Before this year or so, I would never have considered adding to a definition of poetry on a syllabus that it is “language written by a human,” because all language was written by a human, somehow. This is no longer the case. Every human with Internet access and a social-media account has probably noticed, as I have, an uptick in machine-generated texts on, for instance, Instagram and recipe blogs and snazzy hotel websites. I’m decent at spotting the signs, and I’ve seen them everywhere: in magazine writing, in advertisements, in e-mails from local restaurants, in marketing materials from a variety of institutions, in social-media posts from friends, and once even a social-media post by a renowned poet.
But it’s also becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between AI-written and human-written prose, especially at a moment where language has in many cases become flattened and formulaic across spheres.
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I deplore generative AI entirely, and not just because it is deflating and sanitizing the beauty of the written word. In fact I don’t believe in doing too much hand-wringing about whether or not a reader can spot an AI-generated text. Will AI learn to write poetry that is indistinguishable from human-produced poetry? Will my students be able to pass off AI writing as their own? My answer to both of these questions is: I hope not, but probably yes. But also, that’s not my primary concern. The question of the believability of AI-generated writing can distract us from bigger problems. Instead, I want to insist on two things.
The first is that AI writing is bad because generative AI is a product being sold to all of us by dangerous companies run by dangerous, greedy, and unethical people. The environmental and social costs of this product are already felt, and they are extreme. From the exploitation of low-wage workers across the globe whose senses and in some cases bodies are used to train AI models to the hollowing out of communities by data centers that use untold (obscured) amounts of water and energy, from the unleashing of AI as a war machine used to massacre civilians to the way AI can and does consolidate power and knowledge in the hands of those who need it least—none of this is neutral. As the burning world is sucked dry by OpenAI and Anthropic, I find there are bigger concerns than whether or not AI can sound like Emily Dickinson.
But second: I want to insist that it matters where language comes from. No matter how “good” AI writing is, how much it sounds human, it will never be human. I love reading the poets I love for the same reason I don’t mind reading student work: because this is language that has been produced, worked over, ordered, and shaped by a human being with real feelings and experiences. I like it when I can sense the friction; the writer’s struggle to say whatever it is they wanted to say. In the age of AI-generated content, I have even started to love mistakes: the tics, the awkward phrasings, the howlers, anything that tells me there’s a person in there behind the words, anything but the slickness and fundamental, sick, essential deadness of AI-generated writing.
Somewhat to my surprise, my reaction to this influx of fake language has been not only anger, indignation, and disgust but also actual grief. In the early hours of the morning or late at night, I’ve felt a vague but unshakable sadness at the world of text we live in, at the emptiness, at the hollowness, at the fake wit and uniform jauntiness of so much of the medium I really do love. Reading AI-generated text, I suspect even when I don’t know that’s what it is, is lonely. I leave it to the philosophers to trace out the implications of this new hollowed-out linguistic world, but I don’t think my grief is unfounded. If anything, I think it’s probably too muted.
But at the same time, I don’t want to sound only a note of despair. For all the reasons outlined above, generative AI must be vigorously resisted. None of us is doing enough to this end. But I’m also not convinced that humans are going to stop using language to delight themselves or each other.
As I’ve taught this course on poetry, my son—age 2 and a bit—has been coming further and further into language. He’s been telling little stories, and part of his linguistic pleasure surely has to do with his new powers of imagination, but he’s also learning to love words themselves. Language, it turns out, is fun. He likes how words rhyme: “heater,” I say; “cheater,” he says; “beater,” I say; “neater,” he says, and we continue on like this, even though he doesn’t know half the words he’s saying. GUACAMOOOOOLE, he says, doing a funny “o” thing with his mouth, cracking up his parents with the joy of figuring out what he can do.
As far as I know, no AI model will care about the way words feel in their mouths; no AI model will laugh with joy at a combination of syllables. In poetry as in other forms of writing and communication, to use words, to play with them, is a fundamental human pleasure, and this—at least—is some source of hope.
Lindsay TurnerLindsay Turner is a poet and translator. Her third book of poems, Middle Slope, is forthcoming in October. She is an associate professor of English and creative writing at Case Western Reserve University.