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[Cynic Before It Was Cool]

Geek out plox! This is fascinating.

Try to find Lord John Wilmot's poem, Signior Dildo, as well as a folk song called The Crabfish. Shakespeare would toss in any vulgar pun he could think of (see: Hamlet alluding to laying in Opehlia's lap as "country matters.") Chaucer joked about cheating wives and STD's in Canterbury Tales. Apparently, the oldest "Yo Mama" joke was found on a Babylonian tablet that's about 3,500 years old, but... most of it is illegible.

[mate888]

Ancient Saxon and Scandinavian prose battles?
Sounds like something I would pay to watch.

[Magnus]

I don't know; the thing to remember is that computers already have a handicap when it comes to handling human (or Dwarf) language capabilities - that's why the creation of Watson was such a big deal.  Since words aren't always pronounced the way they're spelled, and computers only know words via visual text input, Toady would basically have to create a phonetic dictionary of sorts before he can tell the program how to use it for meter and rhyming schemes.  It may be doable, but it would be a lot of leg-work.

Well, yeah, he'd have to include a rhyme dictionary in the game essentially. And a proper count of the syllables in each word. And some way for the game to check that it's properly combining verbs with nouns with adjectives with adverbs etc. It's probably not worth it but just +poetry book+ is pretty boring. Can you imagine procedurally generated poetry?

Eyes colour of jet black
Her skin like a bark scorpion
Wild hair falls down her back
Her touch like a bark scorpion

My potter makes every other statue a bark scorpion.

Verse that actually rhymes is only a small part of historical poetry. Most of the Viking and Saxon poetry had a much more complicated construction, based on alliteration and syllable length, something more like a haiku. Here's an excerpt from Håvamål off the top of my head, to give you an idea:

Byrði betri
berr-at maðr brautu at,
enn sé mannvit mikit;
Vegnest verra
vegr-a hann velli at,
enn sé ofdrykkja ǫls.