Kubla KhanSamuel Taylor Coleridge
Kubla Khan
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge · first published 1933
8mentions
1recommended by
8HN commenters
2015–2022first – last mentioned
13% recommend88% neutral
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+1 for Coleridge, especially the first stanza of Kubla Khan [0]. Also, I'm surprised to see nobody here recommending A.E. Houseman. His Reveille is my favorite poem: ... Up, lad, up, 'tis late for lying: Hear the drums of morning play; Hark, the empty highways…
on “Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets?” ↗…works: Fermat's proof of his last theorem. He wrote a letter to a friend that said something like "I have a most elegant proof, but it's too big to fit in the margin." Also the second half of Coleridge's Kubla Khan, lost because of the man from Porlock. Douglas Adams made great play of it in Dirk Gently, IIRC.
on “Ask HN: What book(s) do you wish existed?” ↗…the main ASoIaF story line. _26 years_ after reading "A Game of Thrones" I'm not even mad. I've just given up. I'll just put this in the same category as Gordon R. Dickson's Dorsai saga or Coleridge's Kubla Khan: brilliant but never-to-be-finished.
on “Entitlement issues (2009)” ↗I read Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency before ever coming across Coleridge's Kubla Khan and spent quite a bit of time (this was before I was on the Internet) trying to find the rest of the poem. I was quite disappointed once I figured things out but on the plus side I understood what happened…
on “Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets?” ↗…GPT-2 nor GPT-3 can learn to rhyme or make puns (they can only memorize relatively common pairs by bruteforce): https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#bpes I put a good deal of effort into testing this, including "Kubla Khan": https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#samuel-taylor-coleridge Just doesn't work, and it never will until OA trains a model using some sort of better encoding which preserves phonetic information. (Character-based,…
on “The computers are getting better at writing” ↗…(first half XVIII century). (He asked the devil in a dream to play something for him, and the very pale imitation is the Sonata per violino in sol minore he wrote from memory once wake.) Of course, also Kubla Khan from Coleridge comes to mind.
on “Sleep technique used by Salvador Dalí works” ↗…uncharmingly, with “I think I’ll start to rain.” Stephen Marche, writing an article for The New Yorker, assigned GPT-3 maybe the trippiest poem in the English canon: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s fifty-four-line “Kubla Khan”—an opium dream interrupted in the middle of its composition in 1797 and never completed. GPT-3’s mission? Finish the fragment. What the program fantasized was so sophisticated (“The tumult ceased, the…
on “Robots are writing poetry, and many people can’t tell the difference” ↗> Isn’t Kubla Khan opium induced, and someone killed his buzz in the middle of it? Ancient spoiler: it's a plot point in a Douglas Adams novel.
on “Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1834)” ↗