The Poetry Machine

The house on Royal Mile was seven stories tall and had been built in 1847 as a warehouse for wool merchants who had made fortunes trading with the East India Company. By 2015, the wool merchants were dead and the building was something else entirely: a private residence owned by a man who had made more money in seventeen years than the wool merchants had made in one hundred and sixty-eight.

Alexander MacAllister was fifty-five years old, Scottish, self-made, and completely unhinged.

He had founded a technology company—something to do with data storage and cloud infrastructure—that had grown from a startup in a garage in Glasgow to a publicly traded multinational in less than two decades. He had sold the company for nine billion pounds and then bought the wool warehouse and converted it into a residence that contained, among other things, a library of rare books, a collection of 18th-century Scottish portraiture, and—on floors three through six—a supercomputer.

Not just a supercomputer. A poetry machine.

It began, as most obsessions do, with a book. Alexander had found a copy of Robert Burns's Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect at a bookstore on Victoria Street. It was an 1821 edition, the last collection published during Burns's lifetime, with the author's own corrections in pencil marginalia. Alexander, who had not read poetry since school, opened the book out of boredom and read "Tam o' Shanter" in one sitting.

He was hooked.

Over the next six months, he read every poem Burns had ever written. He read them in English and in the Scottish dialect. He read biographies. He visited Burns's cottage in Alloway. He hired a dialect coach to teach him how to speak in the accent of Ayrshire, 1786. He learned to play the bagpipes badly.

And then he decided that he would write a poem that was better than anything Burns had ever written.

He did not think this was arrogance. He thought of it as an engineering problem: if he could understand the complete set of Burns's poetic output, including the biographical and historical context that shaped it, and if he could model the creative process that transformed context into verse, then he could replicate—and improve upon—that process. Given enough computational power.

Which he had.

Floor three of the Royal Mile building housed the hardware: fourteen racks of server equipment, each rack twice the height of a man, each containing processors that could perform calculations at speeds that would have been unimaginable when Burns was writing by candlelight in a cottage that had no fireplace.

Floor four was the data center: every word Burns had ever written, digitized and catalogued. Letters. Diaries. Sketches. Song lyrics. The complete works of Burns's contemporaries for contextual comparison. Weather data for Ayrshire, 1759-1796. Land registry records. Parish church attendance records. The grocery receipts of Burns's father. Everything.

Floor five was the laboratory: where Dr. Fiona Campbell worked. Fiona was forty-two, a professor of Scottish literature at Edinburgh University, and one of the world's leading Burns scholars. Alexander had recruited her with a salary offer that made her university's entire department budget look like pocket change.

"Your job," he had told her in their first meeting, in a office on the seventh floor that looked out over the castle, "is to teach the machine what Robert Burns felt when he wrote these poems."

Fiona had stared at him. "You can't teach a machine what someone felt."

"Oh, but I think you can," Alexander had said, and he had a smile on his face that was both charming and disturbing, like a man who believed he could solve death if he just had enough processors.

Floor six was empty. It was the observation deck. Alexander would go up there and watch the machine work. He would sit in a leather chair and watch the screens and think.

The thinking was the part that nobody else understood.

Eilidh MacAllister, his daughter, understood it least of all. She was twenty-eight, an artist who worked in mixed media—collage, sculpture, digital art—and she had not spoken to her father in eleven months. They had an argument about something trivial (she wanted to exhibit a piece in the house; he said it would "contaminate the aesthetic environment") and after that, she stopped coming.

But she came back, eventually. Artists always come back home, even when home is a seven-story wool warehouse full of servers and a father who speaks to them in the dialect of 18th-century Ayrshire.

She came back on a Thursday in March. She came to the seventh floor, to Alexander's study, and she found him reading Burns. He was reading "To a Mouse," the poem about the mouse whose home is destroyed by the plow.

"You know," Alexander said without looking up, "Burns wrote this after he accidentally plowed under a mouse's nest. The mouse had worked for weeks to build that nest, and in one moment of carelessness, it was gone. Burns felt sorry for the mouse. He felt that the mouse's loss was a metaphor for his own life—how all of our careful plans can be destroyed by forces beyond our control."

"That's a nice interpretation," Eilidh said.

"But I think he felt something else," Alexander said, and now he was looking at his daughter, and his eyes were bright and intense and she knew, with a cold certainty, that the machine had gotten inside his head and was living there. "I think he felt something worse than sorry. I think he felt envy. The mouse was building something real. A nest. Something that existed in the physical world. And Burns was standing there with a plow and a head full of words, and he knew that words were not real. Not the way a nest is real."

Eilidh sat down in the chair opposite him. "Dad. What have you built?"

Alexander put down the book. He took her hand. His hand was cold. "I have built a machine that can write a better poem than Robert Burns ever wrote. I have proven that creativity is not magic. It is mathematics. And mathematics can be solved."

Eilidh looked at her father—a man who had built a company that stored the world's data in the cloud, who had sold it for nine billion pounds, who had bought a building and turned it into a temple to a dead poet—and she felt something that she had not felt in a long time.

Pity.

"It's done," Alexander said.

They went down to floor three. The machine was running. On the main screen, lines of text scrolled past—poetry generated by an algorithm trained on every word Burns had ever written, informed by the biographical and historical data on floor four, processed by the computational power of fourteen server racks that consumed more electricity than the entire Royal Mile.

Eilidh read the poetry. It was good. It was very good. The meter was perfect, the rhyme scheme flawless, the Scottish dialect convincing enough that even Fiona Campbell—standing beside her with her arms crossed and her professor's face—nodded slowly and said: "This is... technically impeccable."

"Technically," Eilidh said.

Fiona looked at her. "Yes."

"Is it good?"

Fiona was silent for a long moment. Then she said: "I don't know. And that is the problem."

That night, Alexander invited a man to the house. His name was James MacKay, and he was sixty-seven years old, an alcoholic poet who lived in a flat above a fish and chip shop in Leith and who was, according to the Edinburgh poetry underground, "the closest thing we have to a real Burns."

James came to the house wearing a tweed jacket that had been repaired so many times it was more thread than fabric, and he was already drunk when he arrived. Alexander showed him the machine. James looked at the screens, at the scrolling poetry, and took a long drink from the whiskey glass that Alexander had poured for him.

"You want me to tell you if it's any good," James said.

"Yes," Alexander said.

James drank again. He looked at the screen. He looked at the poetry. He looked at Alexander.

"It's perfect," James said. "Every syllable is perfect. Every rhyme is perfect. It's the most perfect poem I've ever seen."

"Then why doesn't it move me?"

Alexander did not answer.

James set down his glass. "Let me tell you something, Mr. MacAllister. You can build a machine that writes perfect poems. You can train it on every word Burns ever wrote, and it will write something that Burns would be proud of. But it will never write a poem that makes someone cry. Because to write a poem that makes someone cry, you have to have cried yourself. And this machine has never cried."

He pointed at the screen. "That poem right there? It's got a line—'The moussie's wee wee ha' is fae a blusterin'.' It's perfect. Burns didn't write that line to make you understand mouse nests. He wrote it because he had just destroyed a mouse's nest and he felt guilty. And guilt is not something you can put in a database."

James finished his whiskey. He stood up. He walked to the door. He paused and looked back at Alexander, who was sitting in his leather chair on the observation deck, staring at the screens, his face illuminated by the blue glow of a thousand perfect poems.

"You're a rich man, Mr. MacAllister," James said. "But you're a poor poet. And you will always be a poor poet, because you think poetry is something you can solve. It's not. It's something that solves you."

After James left, Eilidh stayed in the house. She went to floor six, the observation deck, and sat beside her father. She read the machine's poetry aloud. She read three poems. Each one was technically perfect. Each one moved her not at all.

On the fourth poem, she stopped reading.

"Dad," she said.

"Hmm?"

"If you could go back—to before you started this. Before you bought the building. Before you hired Fiona. Before you read Burns's poems. What would you do?"

Alexander did not answer for a long time. The machine scrolled on, generating poem after perfect poem, each one a monument to the fact that creativity, reduced to its components, is just data processing.

"I would," Alexander said quietly, "buy a pen. And a notebook. And I would write a bad poem. Just for me."

Eilidh reached over and took his hand. His hand was cold.

The next morning, Alexander MacAllister went to floor six and turned off the machine. He turned off every server, every rack, every screen. The building went dark and silent and quiet for the first time in two years.

He went to his study on the seventh floor, took out a pen and a notebook, and wrote a line. It was a bad line. It did not rhyme. It did not scan. It said:

Eilidh came home and the machine stopped humming and I felt like a man who had forgotten how to speak.

It was the worst poem he had ever written.

It was the only one that was his.

The Poetry Machine