The Wholly Human Art of Poetry

The AI tool ChatGPT is hardly a poet, my colleague Walt Hunter wrote this week. It may be able to spit out rhyming English verse, but it lacks the “ineffable sense” that’s required to transmute language into something brilliant. Nor does it have the creativity or discernment needed to contribute in a meaningful way to the long, impressive, and deeply human tradition of poetry.

But even for people, poems can be hard to fully understand. As Hunter explains, rather than focusingauthentic inspiration behind it; the key is that the author feels a “necessity to speak a truth.”So even Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s rousing but ordinary . Speaking after his country was invaded by Russia last year, he “grasps the power of a pileup, the inspiration by repetition that calls everyone into the plural,” she says.