I often use AI to create images to illustrate my (too) many blog posts. I was creating an image of myself surrounded by poetry based on what a chatbot already knew about me from prior queries. (You can see the result here.)
Robert Frost and W. H. Auden likely would have responded to AI very differently in tone, but with overlapping concerns about language, humanity, and authenticity.
Frost would be suspicious of abstraction and more interested in the human voice. I think he distrusted systems that moved people away from lived experience and direct human encounter. He valued some ambiguity and the “sound of sense” in language.
Though he might have admired AI’s technical cleverness, he would reject poetry produced without genuine experience behind it. Frost often emphasized that poetry comes from:
AI suggests to me that Frost might have asked, "Can language still be poetry if nobody has lived it?"
Auden might be intellectually fascinated by AI but morally cautious. He was interested in psychology, science, systems of thought, and modernity’s strange transformations and how language shapes society and consciousness.
But Auden worried about propaganda, impersonality, bureaucratic thinking, and probably would not be a supporter of any misuse of technology. Perhaps, he would see AI as an extraordinary linguistic tool, and also a dangerous amplifier of mass conformity or emotional detachment.
Auden wrote, “Poetry makes nothing happen,” but he did not mean that poetry is powerless. He meant poetry changes inner life indirectly, through consciousness and moral perception. He likely would have questioned whether AI can truly participate in moral experience or only imitate its language.
If the two sat down for a conversation and played with AI together, they might have some common ground. They would probably resist the idea that intelligence is merely information processing. Human meaning comes from mortality and embodiment, and art emerges from uncertainty and lived contradiction. The language of poetry matters because people risk themselves in it.
Like many people today, they might warn that AI could encourage people to substitute fluent expression for genuine thought.
They just might concede that much human language is already formulaic, imitative, and patterned. But poetry, for them, was valuable precisely because it resisted that drift into automatic speech.
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