Heine’s poem ‘Still ist die Nacht, es ruhen die Gassen’ (‘The night is still, the streets are dumb’), written in the early 1820s, describes a nocturnal encounter between the poet and his double. The poet returns to stand under the window of the house where his beloved once lived, only to find his double on duty in his place. To the poet, the double’s sighs and hand-wringing seem to be a mocking...

The paper presents a reconstruction of the automatic poetry generation system realized in Italy in 1961 by Nanni Balestrini to compose the poem Tape Mark I. The major goal of the paper is to provide a critical comparison between the high-level approach that seems to be suggested by the poet, and the low-level combinatorial algorithm that was actually implemented. This comparison allows to asses...