PoeticÁI: Write a Poem

Poets who wrote in your language, and an app that speaks it. POETS BY LANGUAGE The roster was twenty English and American poets, which meant a German reader got a German poem written in the manner of Robert Burns. Twenty more poets join them. Hugo, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine and Ronsard. Goethe, Rilke, Schiller, Heine and Hölderlin. Lorca, Neruda, Machado, Bécquer and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Dante, Petrarch, Leopardi, Ungaretti and Montale. Nobody loses a poet. English poets are always there, your device's language is added on top, and anything else you turn on yourself. Your own language leads the row, so the poets most likely to be yours are the first you reach. FORTY-ONE PORTRAITS Every poet now has one, drawn in the same 19th-century engraving style as the illustrations. Tap one for a short life: when they lived, what they wrote, what they were doing to the language. In your language, not only in English. WRITE IN THE POET'S LANGUAGE Optional, and off unless you ask for it. Turn it on and each poem takes the language its poet wrote in, so Rilke answers you in German. Anon always writes in yours. GERMAN, SPANISH AND ITALIAN The whole app, not just the poets: every screen, every form description, and every poet's life story. SETTINGS A new screen, reached from About. The poet languages live there, along with the hand your poems are set in: Euphoria Script, Snell Roundhand or Georgia. That choice was in the app for two years with no way to make it. FIXED Percy Bysshe Shelley's biography opened on nothing, because the catalogue spelled his name one way and the app another. William Blake and Dante Alighieri had lives written for them that no poet in the picker pointed at. All three are now where they should be.