Poetry in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: A Symposium

Case Western Reserve University 

Friday, October 31, 2025

Keynote Speaker: Roland Greene, Stanford University

The Greek origin of poetry in poiesis suggests that the creation of art is something unique, privileged, and perhaps otherworldly. But the nature of this “making” is complicated and contradictory: many of the greatest poets in history have understood poetic creation in wildly different ways. Recently, the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has called into question the premise that only human minds are capable of true poiesis. The era of artificial intelligence, if that is what this is, raises fresh questions and reinvigorates old ones about the nature of poetic creativity, form, and value. Is writing poetry a learned skill, or a natural talent? Does it come from the inspiration of a metaphysical power, or does it proceed from experience in life and with words? Aristotle affirms that poets strive to create what is probable—is this precisely how LLMs operate, or are such quantitative probabilities different from the poet’s investment in what is probable? How closely related is the LLM’s probability to the human’s? This symposium will explore how advances in technology provoke and inspire us to revisit and reexamine the foundations of poetic creativity. Panels will include 15 minute presentations with time for coordinated conversation and Q&A.

Paper topics might include: 

-    aesthetic judgment in an age of artificial intelligence: how can we tell good poems from bad ones? 

-    cognitive approaches to the study of poetry 

-    the future of new formalism in an era of new technologies of writing

-    defenses and apologies for poetry

-    historical approaches to the study of poetry and technology

-    readings of poetry written using AI

-    philosophies of the posthuman and poetic subjectivity 

-    reader reception of LLM-generated poetry

Please send a 250 word abstract and a brief biographical statement to Ryan Pfeiffer (rmp148@case.edu) by August 1, 2025. Participants who have been accepted will be notified by August 10, 2025.