Please help me find poetry software!

[DrZoidberg]

Hey guys. I'd love some help.

I like writing poetry. And over the years I've become more and more technical in how I like to do it. So I want an app for support.

I want to be able to pick rhyme, meter and foot and there's some visual guide to help show it on the page. I want rhyme, syllables and stresses shown. I want an inbuilt thesaurus, and suggestions for improvements. Or more importantly, warnings when it's broken.

I've tried googling this. But I can't finding a good program for it. I've been looking for something for years.

I've considered making a program like this myself. Because technically, it's not that difficult. Any free online dictionary contains all the necessary meta data to do all of the above. Which makes me wonder, why it's so hard to find a program like this? Somebody must surely have made something like this already?

The only apps I find for this is inspo type apps. Or poem generators. Or making your poem pretty on the page. Not technical support apps. There's plenty of apps for musical notation. Which is basically the same thing. So it should exist for this to?

Any help would be much appreciated

 

[ChaseJxyz]

What you're describing seems sort of like autocomplete but for poems? Or something like GitHub's Copilot. Most writing programs already have thesauruses, as most of what you're doing in poetry is putting words down.

Musical notation is 100% a totally different thing than writing poems, as you have only a certain selection of notes you can pick, they have to be put in a standardized format, and there's lots of different parts/instruments you need to keep track of to write a complex piece. You can't do this in Microsoft Word without really pushing the limits of the software, which is why there's special software for that.

I'm sure that, somewhere, on some lonely repo, there is something that is what you want...but it's probably not out there in a form that's easy to find or download. And, yeah, technically it wouldn't be TOO difficult, my group chat's chatbot can automatically generate sonnets/quatrains/villanelles based off things people say, but it's still very clearly written by a bot. Would there be enough poets who would want software that does that amount of the creative work for them? Or would they feel like the suggestions would be too limiting? That's the ultimate question, I guess.

 

[Jackie]

I can see, when writing in perfect iambic pentameter, wanting a green line to appear under any word that falls off beat. I can also see when rhyming each stanza abba, wanting to be warned if an ending word doesn't fit. I can see becoming so comfortable with this app that sometime in the future it will seem joined to your fingers when you type.

But you will still have to write the poem—that breathtakingly insightful poem!

 

[DrZoidberg]

What you're describing seems sort of like autocomplete but for poems? Or something like GitHub's Copilot. Most writing programs already have thesauruses, as most of what you're doing in poetry is putting words down.

Musical notation is 100% a totally different thing than writing poems, as you have only a certain selection of notes you can pick, they have to be put in a standardized format, and there's lots of different parts/instruments you need to keep track of to write a complex piece. You can't do this in Microsoft Word without really pushing the limits of the software, which is why there's special software for that.

I'm sure that, somewhere, on some lonely repo, there is something that is what you want...but it's probably not out there in a form that's easy to find or download. And, yeah, technically it wouldn't be TOO difficult, my group chat's chatbot can automatically generate sonnets/quatrains/villanelles based off things people say, but it's still very clearly written by a bot. Would there be enough poets who would want software that does that amount of the creative work for them? Or would they feel like the suggestions would be too limiting? That's the ultimate question, I guess.

I do a lot of counting syllables when I write poetry. Often unsure. Have to look up the word in a dictionary and sound it out. It's time consuming and something I think does well as automated.

As is breaking it up into lines, shifting it around and watching where the stresses end up. It's always nice to see quickly if my final stress is hanging in thin air.

I don't see that as the program writing the poem for me. Nobody thinks a writer using a word processor, rather than writing in long hand as the computer doing the work.

Integrating a thesaurus, with suggestions is a nice feature. But wouldn't be my main use of this.

I should have written this post as a poem and insist everybody answers also write it in poem form, to demonstrate how useful it would be

 

[DrZoidberg]

I can see, when writing in perfect iambic pentameter, wanting a green line to appear under any word that falls off beat. I can also see when rhyming each stanza abba, wanting to be warned if an ending word doesn't fit. I can see becoming so comfortable with this app that sometime in the future it will seem joined to your fingers when you type.

But you will still have to write the poem—that breathtakingly insightful poem!

I agree. But I don't feel like the food is worse because I cook it on an electrical stove rather than over open fire on a savannah. Perhaps less authentic. But does save me a lot of time.

 

[Unimportant]

But if it doesn't make your plums colder, or sweeter......

 

[DrZoidberg]

Found it. It wasn't exactly how I'd envisaged it. But pretty damn close. And in some ways better than what I imagined. In this case truth is better than fiction.

McGill English Dictionary of Rhyme with VersePerfect

Download McGill English Dictionary of Rhyme with VersePerfect for Windows to get an extensive rhyming reference for your poetry.

download.cnet.com