“dearest_boy" is a poem generated by breaking apart, removing lines, and sometimes shuffling five letters from Oscar Wilde to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. Each stanza comes from one letter, with a few letters generating multiple stanzas. In the work of writing this poem, many more stanzas were generated than ended up being used (in many ways, the job of a computational poet is curation, and the question this raises of who exactly the poet is - Oscar Wilde, the computer, or me - is one that new media art has been considering for decades.)
After generation and selection, I decided on the ordering of the stanzas, changed some of the line breaks, chose punctuation, and removed a few words to improve clarity and flow as a cohesive poem.
The code provided could similarly break and shuffle other letters or prose works and is itself a poem generator.
Inspired by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram's Travesty Generator and Nick Montfort's Through the Park (https://nickm.com/poems/through_the_park.py)
Always
Oscar
with undying love,
whom Apollo loved so madly,
your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry -
why are you alone? London
was you in Greek days.
I know Hyacinthus,
roseleaf lips of yours should be made
no less for the madness of music and song than for the madness of kissing,
distorted with passion.
You must not make scenes with me.
I would sooner be blackmailed by every renter in London than to have you, bitter
thing of grace and beauty.
Dearest of All Boys,
so Greek and gracious,
I cannot see you,
and you can really recreate in me
that energy and sense of joyous power
on which art depends and just send a line
to say that I feel that my only hope of again doing beautiful work
is being with you.
Do remake my ruined life for me,
but now it is different.
It is only with you that I can do
anything at all
There are such wide abysses now of space and land between us
or any news or message even.
I gave up to you always
power,
and for the most shameful reason.
Jonquil or Narcisse,
look at the history of that letter -
it is denounced by your father's Counsel as a revolting and insidious attempt to corrupt
Innocence,
but you,
whatever is realised is right,
the meaning of Sorrow,
Oscar Wilde.
Everyone is furious with me for going back to you.
But we love each other,
dear.