My search for love poems turns up bias

Imagine two people, earnest in their desire to express love for one another this Valentine’s Day. “Love poems,” one types into the browser address bar. The other types into the search field above Google’s ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button. One sits in an apartment, the other at a streetcorner bus stop.

Who are these people? Men? Women? Old? Young? They scroll through the search results — the ones that jump out because they are at the top and illustrated with bright rectangular images, what in user interface parlance is called a “carousel.” These are the privileged results, the ones that come first: Robert Burns, Edgar Allan Poe, Christopher Marlowe, Robert Browning, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Shakespeare — six sonnets to choose from! — John Donne, John Keats, Andrew Marvell, Edward Lear, Alexander Pushkin, Thomas Hardy, John Donne (again!), Dante Alighieri, T. S. Eliot, Poe (again!), Keats (again!), Geoffrey Chaucer, Ovid and then Ovid again!, Walt Whitman, William Blake, Hart Crane.

With the exception of Sylvia Plath’s “Mad Girl’s Love Song” and Marie Stope’s “Oriri,” all of the poems are by men. And not one of the poets is alive today.

I can imagine what my characters see, because the results I describe are the ones returned to me as I write this.

I’ve been searching for love poems for months. Each time I hit the search button, I hope the results in the carousel will surprise me. They do not. A few titles change. Sometimes, Emily Dickinson’s “Wild Nights — Wild Nights!” jumps out with its bright pink cover image. I’ve seen Matthew Arnold, Thomas Wyatt, Ben Jonson, Elizabeth Bishop. But the gender imbalance in the love poet crew at the top of the results page remains more or less the same.

I could rant about this and nothing would change. I know because I’ve tried. I could make my own love poem carousels, and I did (containing selections from 1,000 love poems by wonderful poets such as Ada Limón, Xandria Phillips, Rebecca Morgan Frank, Nikki Giovanni). Every now and then someone stumbles across them. According to Google’s keyword planner, people search for “love poems” on Google between 100,000 and 1 million times each month. The results at the top of the page have tremendous visibility. Why those poems? Why did Google choose this particular set at the top? The poems tagged as love poems on the Academy of American Poets website have closer to 45% female authors. I know because I looked at each author bio and tallied by pronoun (he, she and they).

Many of the poets are also ... alive! A close look at the website of the Poetry Foundation — an organization committed to the “vigorous presence for poetry in our culture” — reveals that the gender imbalance is nowhere near as alarming as in the featured Google results.

Clicking a poem in Google’s carousel takes one to a results page specific to the poem. I clicked every poem in the carousel. This is how I learned that nearly every poem in the carousel also has a Wikipedia page.

I have spent many hours looking at Wikipedia pages, but until last week, I hadn’t paid much attention to pages devoted to individual poems. When I looked, I saw a gender balance that could easily have inspired the one in Google’s privileged carousel results. This list of poems, for example, is relentlessly male dominated. The poems categorized by author also show an imbalance. And, like Google’s love poem carousel, Wikipedia’s “Love poem” category contains a remarkable number of the sonnets of William Shakespeare.

Women have been left out of history for generations. When I scroll through Google’s love poem carousel or Wikipedia’s poem categories, I feel not just as if I’m visiting the past, but that technology is imprisoning us there. By what mechanism were the poems in Google’s carousel chosen and prioritized? As Edna St. Vincent Millay once wrote: I do not approve.

And I am not resigned.

Before I logged out of Wikipedia, I started three new pages: one for June Jordan’s “Poem for My Love,” one for Kay Ryan’s “Tenderness and Rot,” one for Margaret Atwood’s “Variations on the Word Love.” I hope that the search engine will one day feature such voices, and fear that the fledgling pages will not be deemed “notable” and will not survive.

I made these pages just last week. So far, they remain.

I battle a windmill. But this, too, is love.

Kirsten MengerAnderson is a San Francisco writer whose essays have appeared in publications including Undark, Towards Data Science, and LitHub. She is also the author of the fiction collection Doctor Olaf van Schuler’s Brain (Algonquin, 2008).

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