How you can use AI to help you learn more about poetry

Ask AI for creative writing prompts

The beauty of creative writing is that anything can be used as a jumping-off point for a beautiful work. Use AI-powered tools to generate creative writing prompts such as a random phrase, a full line of poetry, or a set of words that can be connected into a unified work. All of these can be used as a starting point for writing poetry: you can challenge students to flex their creative muscles and see what kind of interesting and unusual angles that this work can lead to.

AI for poetry analysis

AI can be used for poetry analysis, no matter what style you’re exploring. The lengthy narratives of epic poetry, for example, can seem dense and daunting at first. But by asking AI to analyze a work for theme, tone, imagery, and other literary devices, you can discover meanings and clues to what a line might hold, how effective the work is at conveying its themes, and gain a deeper understanding of the mechanics of poetry.

If you’re looking to analyze your own work, AI tools can provide feedback on areas like grammar, syntax, and the voice of your narrator. This can help you discover hidden or subtle meanings that you may have never thought of before! Once you put another perspective on your own creative work, you might even wind up with a breakthrough in your own themes and message.

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Understand different poetic forms with AI-generated examples

You can easily explore poetic forms with AI by drawing upon it to provide examples of various forms. Many writers know what a haiku is, for example, but do you know what a ghazal or pantoum is?

In a ghazal, each couplet ends on the same word or phrase, and is preceded by the couplet’s rhyming word—notice how the couplets end with the first few lines of Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s “Red Ghazal:”

I’ve noticed after a few sips of tea, the tip of her tongue, thin and red with heat, quickens when she describes her cuts and bruises—deep violets and red.

The little girl I baby-sit, hair orange and wild, sits splayed and upside down on a couch, insists her giant book of dinosaurs is the only one she’ll ever read.

The night before I left him, I could not sleep, my eyes fixed on the freckles of his shoulder, the glow of the clock, my chest heavy with dread.

And in a pantoum, the second and fourth lines of each stanza are used as the first and third lines of the next one, and poems usually have four to five stanzas—such as in A.E. Stallings’ “Another Lullaby for Insomniacs:”

Sleep, she will not linger:
She turns her moon-cold shoulder.
With no ring on her finger,
You cannot hope to hold her.

She turns her moon-cold shoulder
And tosses off the cover.
You cannot hope to hold her:
She has another lover.

She tosses off the cover
And lays the darkness bare.
She has another lover.
Her heart is otherwhere.

She lays the darkness bare.
You slowly realize
Her heart is otherwhere.
There’s distance in her eyes.

You slowly realize
That she will never linger,
With distance in her eyes
And no ring on her finger.

Asking AI what either of these forms is, and providing examples, can help you unlock new and unusual poetic forms. And when you ask AI to rewrite an existing work into a new poetic form, you might gain insight into how these phrasings, stanzas, and couplets work. These tools can enhance and supplement your creative writing process.