Poetry Machine

One of the most popular features on the old shakespeare.com was the Poetry Machine - a kind of virtual Shakespeare Magnet Poetry collection that selects magnets for you in the approximate frequency the words appear in Shakespeare's works. To rearrange them, just drag them around with your mouse. Recreating it here turned out not to be too difficult.
Simply enter the number of word magnets you'd like to receive:
Then click:
If you come up with a really good poem using this feature, why don't you let the rest of us know about it by submitting it via the Comments form. Here's one I recently created, for example. Kinda cryptic, but not bad: treacherous Polyxenes

7 Comments to “Poetry Machine”

  1. marcus simmonDecember 9, 2009 at 12:49 pm

    Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.

    Unpopular comment. Agree? Thumb up 104 Thumb down 113

  2. alyNovember 18, 2009 at 10:56 pm

    almost inhuman woman could marvellos loved
    knows desperate mourning
    leonine bridaled
    boasting conception rises
    grandfather delivers colours decending
    generals marching hereafter skrimish knows
    “dismiss horrible prosperity”

    Popular comment. Agree? Thumb up 93 Thumb down 87

  3. SusanNovember 10, 2009 at 12:39 am

    Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.

    Unpopular comment. Agree? Thumb up 59 Thumb down 90

    • prosperoNovember 12, 2009 at 8:05 pm

      It worked fine for me using Chrome – just drag and drop. Are you using the latest version on Windows XP, like I am?

      I did notice one peculiarity though – rolling the dice again doesn’t update the applet. And if you close the applet tab, it doesn’t open a new one. Sounds like a bug in Chrome to me.

      That being said, I myself typically use Firefox on Windows, and Safari on Mac – and consequently tend to notice and fix bugs for those browsers more quickly.

      Indeed, your comment made me try IE – for which I used to maintain a separate version – and discover that when I removed the separate version – and thought it worked with the Firefox code – I was wrong – it doesn’t work on IE at all now.

      I’ll have to fix that.

      Unpopular comment. Agree? Thumb up 38 Thumb down 89

      • prosperoNovember 12, 2009 at 8:46 pm

        It should work again on IE – but I had to make the height and width of the playing surface fixed, since IE doesn’t support innerHeight/Width.

        Unpopular comment. Agree? Thumb up 37 Thumb down 79

  4. EvelioJuly 9, 2009 at 2:20 pm

    Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.

    Unpopular comment. Agree? Thumb up 73 Thumb down 83

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.