In a column written soon after the public release of ChatGPT, Ezra Klein wrote that AI's "thinking," for lack of a better word, is utterly inhuman, but we have trained it to present as deeply human" (The New York Times, March ENGLISH 12, 2023). Implicit in Klein's thesis is the assumption that we do understand human thinking, or at least how to recognize it, and that AI confronts us with something radically different masquerading as the familiar. But perhaps the world has long been populated by different kinds of thinking entities. That appears to be the claim of a number of critics working on poetry today: these scholars argue that poems are their own species of thinking machine, with the ability to represent a speaker's thinking, to facilitate a reader's thinking, to articulate structures of thinking, or even to think for themselves. In this course, we'll examine such claims by close reading poems from a range of writers while also engaging works of criticism that grapple with these questions from formalist, phenomenological, and philosophical perspectives. We'll ask what it might mean to say that poems think and whether they can help us think critically about thinking in general, about the ways AI is represented and understood as thinking, and about the cognitive dynamics of our increasingly AI-inflected economy and culture.
4 units · Letter or Credit/No Credit
In a column written soon after the public release of ChatGPT, Ezra Klein wrote that AI's "thinking," for lack of a better word, is utterly inhuman, but we have trained it to present as deeply human" (The New York Times, March 12, 2023). Implicit in Klein's thesis is the assumption that we do understand human thinking, or at least how to recognize it, and that AI confronts us with something radically different masquerading as the familiar. But perhaps the world has long been populated by different kinds of thinking entities. That appears to be the claim of a number of critics working on poetry today: these scholars argue that poems are their own species of thinking machine, with the ability to represent a speaker's thinking, to facilitate a reader's thinking, to articulate structures of thinking, or even to think for themselves. In this course, we'll examine such claims by close reading poems from a range of writers while also engaging works of criticism that grapple with these questions from formalist, phenomenological, and philosophical perspectives. We'll ask what it might mean to say that poems think and whether they can help us think critically about thinking in general, about the ways AI is represented and understood as thinking, and about the cognitive dynamics of our increasingly AI-inflected economy and culture.
Offered in Autumn 2026 at Stanford University.