A History of Computational Poetics: Agency, Automation and the Post-Human

The central question of this thesis is can computational technology create poetry? For the most part, questions concerning computers making poetry are interpreted within our contemporary technological and cultural paradigm. As a departure from this present and future-oriented perspective, this thesis argues that computational poetics has ancient origins, and is iterated across diverse cultural and technological paradigms throughout history with a degree of consistency. To develop this line of argumentation, this thesis examines a number of examples of computational poetics throughout a long history, from ancient divination rituals in China and West Africa, to poetic bots on Twitter.