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Was there a poem by Aleister Crowley that involved a mechanical girl?

Literature Asked on August 23, 2021

Was there a poem by Aleister Crowley that involved a mechanical girl?

I remember finding one with a straight-forward title, like “The Mechanical Girl” or something, when looking up early uses of pre-computer humanoid automatons in literature…

But now I can’t find it, and I’m not sure if it’s actually by some other author around the same time, like Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers.

I’ve gone through Wikipedia’s List of fictional robots and androids in literature before the 20th century, and nothing rings a bell.

2 Answers

I was right about the author, it was just the title being one word off.

It's "The Automatic Girl" by Alesister Crowley, from PDF page 143 of the erotic poetry book, Snowdrops From A Curate's Garden.

The poem is mentioned in only about 261 pages on the internet, according to Google, and isn't mentioned on Wikipedia, so it's not that well known.

Correct answer by Malady on August 23, 2021

The Complete Works of Aleister Crowley are available online, linked from the University of Pennsylvania website. I checked the contents list for each of the Volumes I, II, and III, but didn't see anything that looked like "The Mechanical Girl".

The closest possibilities I saw were the poems in Crowley's collection Rodin in Rime, apparently inspired by the art of the French sculptor Auguste Rodin. This poetry collection is available as a searchable PDF, and the word "mechanical" doesn't appear anywhere, nor various synonyms and related terms which I tried in both French and English (the titles of these poems are in French, the poems themselves in English).

Answered by Rand al'Thor on August 23, 2021

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