About

Poemly started because most poem generators are the same tool wearing different names. Type a word, get back four lines of soft rhyming filler about hearts and dreams, whatever form you asked for. Ask one for a villanelle and you will usually get a poem of no particular length with no refrains in it.

The difference here is that the form is treated as a contract. A haiku is three lines of five, seven and five syllables, and the editor shows you the count landing as it writes. A sonnet is fourteen lines of iambic pentameter with a turn in the argument. A villanelle is nineteen lines with two refrains in fixed positions. If you pick the form, the generator is held to its rules rather than nodding at them.

How the poems are written

Each poem is generated by a large language model, guided by instructions written for that particular form. Those instructions also rule out the vocabulary that gives machine poetry away: whispering winds, dancing shadows, tapestries of life, journeys of the soul. They say plainly that a forced rhyme is worse than no rhyme, and that an image beats a statement about a feeling.

It is not a poet. It has no life to draw on and nothing at stake. What it can do is hold a form steady and give you a draft to argue with, which is often the hardest part of starting.

What it costs

Nothing. No daily cap, no card, and no feature held back. You can write as many poems as you like without ever making an account.

An account is optional, and honestly it does little yet. Your poems are saved in your own browser either way. Syncing them across your devices is what accounts are for, and it is the next thing being built. If paid features arrive later they will be new additions, not things taken away from what is here now.

On using it honestly

Use the poems freely, in a card, a speech, a reading or a book. If the poem is for a class, the useful thing is to generate one, read how the form works on the form pages, and then write your own. That is the version worth handing in.