Imitations of Immortality

Learning to generate poetry in the style of the poet can make models style experts, but humans who create imitative works take a more general approach that incorporates knowledge outside the poet's style. Instead of learning from a large corpus of one poet's works, can machines imitate deep style using only one example of her work? To explore generating poetic variations for a web-based installation art work, I wrote eight poems that imitated the structure of eight poets, and used them to fine tune a transformer model that has seen only one poem by each author. The poems presented show structures borrowing from the human imitation in addition to prompted content of the original, suggesting the model has learned aspects of how humans write variations on content by imitating style.