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What Mortal End single work   poetry   "Those quick inventive brains, who with early distant"
Issue Details: First known date: 1991... 1991 What Mortal End
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

Three poems written by Matthew Arnold ('The Buried Life', 'Dover Beach', and 'The Scholar-Gypsy') typed as one continuous text and put through a computer program (Neil J. Rubenking's 'Brekdown' ) to re-assemble in a different form. Both the title and the author's name are anagrams of Matthew Arnold.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Meanjin vol. 50 no. 4 Summer 1991 Z633452 1991 periodical issue 1991 pg. 633
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Jacket no. 4 July 1998 Z893990 1998 periodical issue 1998
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Related Works

'Dogs in All the Unregarded Bales' : Mr Rubenking's 'Breakdown' [sic] John Tranter , 1991 single work prose
— Appears in: Meanjin , Summer vol. 50 no. 4 1991; (p. 635-638) Jacket , July no. 4 1998;

'BrekDown' is a text analysis and text generation program written in Turbo Pascal for IBM-compatible personal computers, devised in 1985 by the San Francisco programmer Neil J. Rubenking. 'Brekdown' can also blend the styles of two or more texts, and reconstruct a text with the characteristics of this blended style.

The article is accompanied by two examples of this 'robot poetry' - 'What Mortal End' and 'Her Shy Banjo' derived from the works of Matthew Arnold and John Ashbery respectively. Both the titles of these poems and the names of their authors are anagrams of the real poets' names. John Tranter has also written seven prose pieces using this technique, in each case blending two writers into one new creature. They appear in Different Hands (1998).
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Last amended 14 Oct 2002 13:35:17
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