The robot is shaped like a human, but it sure doesn’t move like one. It starts supine on the floor, pancake-flat. Then, in a display of superhuman joint mobility, its legs curl upward from the knees, sort of like a scorpion tail, until its feet settle firmly on the floor beside its hips. From there, it stands up, a swiveling mass of silver limbs. The robot’s ring-light heads turns a full 180 degrees to face the camera, as though possessed. Then it lurches forward at you.

The scene plays out like one of those moments in a sci-fi movie when the heroes think for sure the all-powerful villain must be done for, but somehow he comes back stronger than ever. Except it’s a real-life video released last month by the robotics company Boston Dynamics to introduce its new Atlas robot. The humanoid machine, according to the video’s caption, is intended to further the company’s “commitment to delivering the most capable, useful mobile robots solving the toughest challenges in industry today.” It has also freaked out many people, and the video has garnered millions of views. “Impressive? Yes. Terrifying? Absolutely,” wrote a reporter for The Verge. Terminator and I, Robot memes abounded. Elon Musk suggested that it looked like it was in the throes of an exorcism.

You might think that such reactions would concern Boston Dynamics, that it would seem bad for the public to associate your product with dystopian sci-fi. But the company is used to this. Over the past decade-plus, Boston Dynamics has become arguably America’s most famous robotics company by posting unnerving viral videos that elicit a predictable cascade of reactions: things like “Could you imagine this thing chasing you?” and “We’re doomed.” When the company posts a video like the one of the new Atlas, and viewers get worked up, it all appears to be part of the plan.

Even if you don’t know Boston Dynamics by name, there is a good chance you have seen one of its videos before. Clips of robots running faster than Usain Bolt and dancing in sync, among many others, have helped the company reach true influencer status. Its videos have now been viewed more than 800 million times, far more than those of much bigger tech companies, such as Tesla and OpenAI. The creator of Black Mirror even admitted that an episode in which killer robot dogs chase a band of survivors across an apocalyptic wasteland was directly inspired by Boston Dynamics’ videos.

The company got into the viral-video game by accident. Now owned by Hyundai, Boston Dynamics was founded in 1992 as a spin-off of an MIT robotics lab, and for years had operated in relative obscurity. In the 2000s, someone grabbed a video off the company’s website and uploaded it to YouTube. Before long, it had 3.5 million views. That first YouTube hit is when “the light went on—this matters,” Marc Raibert, the founder, has said. (Boston Dynamics did not provide an interview or comment for this story.) In July 2008, the company created a YouTube channel and began uploading its own videos. Almost every one topped 1 million views. Within a few years, they were regularly collecting tens of millions.

Many of Boston Dynamics’ videos seem engineered to fuel people’s most dystopian fantasies, such as the one in which it dressed its humanoid robot in camo and a gas mask. But the company is careful not to lean too far in this direction. Alongside videos of the robots looking creepy or performing incredible feats, it has offered ones in which the robots failed spectacularly, were bullied by their human makers, or did silly dances; in response, people  professed to feeling “sorry for” or “emotionally attached to” these robots. The company’s recent farewell video for its old Atlas model, retired days before the new one was released, included clips of the robot toppling off a balance beam and tumbling down a hill. “What we’ve tried to do is make videos that you can just look at and understand what you’re seeing,” Raibert told Wired in 2018. “You don’t need words, you don’t need an explanation. We’re neither hiding anything nor faking anything.”

Boston Dynamics has not said much publicly about how it trains its robots. But when viewers watch videos of the recently retired hydraulic Atlas doing parkour, they might well assume that if it can execute such complex maneuvers, then it can do pretty much anything. In fact, it has likely been programmed to perform a handful of specific tricks, Chelsa Finn, an AI researcher at Stanford University, told me last year. As I wrote then, robots have lagged behind chatbots and other kinds of generative AI because “the physical world is extremely complicated, far more so than language.” The company posted its first video of Atlas doing a backflip in 2017; more than six years later, the robot still is not commercially available. “The athletic part of robotics is really doing well,” Raibert told Wired in January, “but we need the cognitive part.”

The actual business of Boston Dynamics is comparatively mundane. Currently, its humanoid robots are purely for research and development. Its commercial products—a large robotic arm and a small robotic dog—are used mainly for moving boxes and workplace safety and inspections. “The perception of how far along the field is that we get from these highly curated, essentially PR-campaign videos … from different companies is a bit distorted,” Raphaël Millière, a philosopher at Macquarie University, in Sydney, whose work focuses on artificial intelligence and cognitive science, told me. “You should always take these with a grain of salt, because they’re likely to be carefully choreographed routines.”

The company, for its part, has gestured at the limits of its robots in press releases and YouTube descriptions. But it still keeps posting dystopian videos that keep freaking people out. “They probably made a calculated decision that actually this is not bad press,” Millière said, “but rather, it makes the videos more viral.” The company recognizes that we love fantasizing about our own demise—to a point—and it supplies regular fodder. The strategy has paid off. Now pretty much all the top robotics companies post video demonstrations on YouTube, some of which are more advanced than Boston Dynamics’. Its video introducing the new Atlas robot garnered more than twice as many views as this frankly far more impressive video from the lesser-known robotics company Figure.

In recent years, AI companies seem to have taken a page out of the Boston Dynamics playbook. When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman talks about the existential threat of superhuman AI, he is in effect deploying the same strategy. So, too, are the other executives who have invoked the “risk of extinction” that AI poses to humanity. As my colleague Matteo Wong has written, AI doomerism functions as a fantastic PR strategy, in that it makes the product seem far more advanced than it actually is.

Boston Dynamics is poised to benefit from the revolution those companies have delivered. Hardly a week after the launch of ChatGPT in late November 2022, the company announced the creation of a new AI Institute. Last month, it posted a video about using simulations and machine learning to teach its robot dogs how to move through a range of real-world environments. And the press release for the new Atlas robot explicitly talked up the company’s progress in AI and machine learning over the past couple of years: “We have equipped our robots with new AI and machine learning tools, like reinforcement learning and computer vision, to ensure they can operate and adapt efficiently to complex real-world situations.” In normal English, Atlas might soon not just look but actually be, in a certain sense, possessed. Now that would really be scary.

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From the 1970s through the 2000s, Marjorie Perloff and Helen Vendler were regularly mentioned together as America’s leading interpreters of poetry. When a 2000 article in Poets & Writers referred jokingly to a “Vendler-Perloff standoff,” Perloff objected to the habitual comparison. “Helen Vendler and I have extraordinarily different views on contemporary poetry and different critical methodologies, but we are assumed to be affiliated because we are both women critics of a certain age in a male-dominated field,” she wrote in 1999.

Now fate has paired them again: Perloff’s death in late March, at age 92, was followed last week by Vendler’s at age 90. Both remained active to the very end: Perloff wrote the introduction to a new edition of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published this year, and the current issue of the journal Liberties includes an essay by Vendler on war and PTSD in poetry. But for many poets and readers of poetry, the loss of these towering scholars and critics feels like the definitive end of an era that has been slowly passing for years. In our more populist time, when poetry has won big new audiences by becoming more accessible and more engaged with issues of identity, Vendler and Perloff look like either remote elitists or the last champions of aesthetic complexity, depending on your point of view.

Age and gender may have played a role in their frequent pairing, as Perloff suspected, but it was their different outlooks as critics that made them such perfect foils. They stood for opposite ways of thinking about the art of poetry—how to write it, how to read it, what kind of meaning and pleasure to expect from it.

Vendler was a traditionalist, championing poets who communicated intimate thoughts and emotions in beautiful, complex language. As a scholar, she focused on clarifying the mechanics of that artistry. Her magnum opus, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, is a feat of “close reading,” examining the 154 poems word by word to wring every drop of meaning from them. In analyzing “Sonnet 23,” for instance, she highlights the 11 appearances of the letter l in the last six lines, arguing that these “liquid repeated” letters are “signs of passion.”

For Vendler, poetic form was not just a display of virtuosity, but a way of making language more meaningful. As she wrote in the introduction to her anthology Poems, Poets, Poetry (named for the popular introductory class she taught for many years at Harvard), the lyric poem is “the most intimate of genres,” whose purpose is to let us “into the innermost chamber of another person’s mind.” To achieve that kind of intimacy, the best poets use all the resources of language—not just the meaning of words, but their sounds, rhythms, patterns, and etymological connections.

Perloff, by contrast, championed poetry that defied the very notion of communication. She was drawn to the avant-garde tradition in modernist literature, which she described in her book Radical Artifice as “eccentric in its syntax, obscure in its language, and mathematical rather than musical in its form.” She found this kind of spiky intelligence in John Ashbery, John Cage, and the late-20th-century school known as Language poetry, which drew attention to the artificiality of language by using it in strange and nonsensical ways. One of her favorite poets was Charles Bernstein, whose poem “A Test of Poetry” begins:

What do you mean by rashes of ash? Is industry

systematic work, assiduous activity, or ownership
of factories? Is ripple agitate lightly? Are
we tossed in tune when we write poems?

For Perloff, the difficulty of this kind of poem had a political edge. At a time when television and advertising were making words smooth and empty, she argued that poets had a moral duty to resist by using language disruptively, forcing readers to sit up and pay attention. “Poetic discourse,” she wrote, “defines itself as that which can violate the system.”

For Vendlerites, Perloff’s approach to poetry could seem excessively theoretical and intellectual; for Perloffians, Vendler’s taste could seem too conventional. (Perloff wrote that when her “poet friends … really want to put me down, they say that I’m not so different from Helen Vendler!”) Vendler’s scholarly books explored canonical poets such as Wallace Stevens, W. B. Yeats, and Robert Lowell; Perloff’s focused on edgier figures such as Gertrude Stein and the French Oulipo group, which experimented with artificial constraints on writing, such as avoiding the letter e. When it came to living poets, Vendler’s favorites tended to win literary prizes—Pulitzers, National Book Awards, and in the case of her friend and colleague Seamus Heaney, the Nobel. Perloff’s seldom did, finding admiration inside the academy instead.

These differences in taste can be seen as a reflection of the critics’ very different backgrounds. Vendler was born in Boston and attended Catholic schools and a Catholic college before earning a doctorate from Harvard. She went on to teach for 20 years at Boston University and then returned to Harvard as a star faculty member. She spoke about the open sexism she initially encountered in the Ivy League, but she was a product of that milieu and eventually triumphed in it.

Perloff was born to a Jewish family in Vienna and came to New York in 1938 as a 6-year-old refugee from Nazism. (In her memoir, The Vienna Paradox, she wrote that she exchanged her original name, Gabrielle, for Marjorie because she thought it sounded more American.) She earned her Ph.D. from Catholic University, in Washington, D.C., and spent most of her academic career in California, at the opposite corner of the country from the Ivy League and its traditions. Perloff’s understanding of high art as a tool for disrupting mass culture unites her with thinkers of the Frankfurt School such as Theodor Adorno—German Jewish émigrés of an older generation, many of whom also ended up in California.

In his poem “Little Gidding,” written during World War II, T. S. Eliot wrote that the Cavaliers and Puritans who fought in England’s Civil War, in the 17th century, now “are folded in a single party.” The same already seems true of Vendler and Perloff. Today college students are fleeing humanities majors, and English departments are desperately trying to lure them back by promoting the ephemera of pop culture as worthy subjects of study. (Vendler’s own Harvard English department has been getting a great deal of attention for offering a class on Taylor Swift.) Both Vendler and Perloff, by contrast, rejected the idea that poetry had to earn its place in the curriculum, or in the culture at large, by being “relevant.” Nor did it have to be defended on the grounds that it makes us more virtuous citizens or more employable technicians of reading and writing.

Rather, they believed that studying poetry was valuable in and of itself. In her 2004 Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities, Vendler argued that art, not history or theory, should be the center of a humanistic education, because “artworks embody the individuality that fades into insignificance in the massive canvas of history.” Perloff made a similar argument in her 1999 essay “In Defense of Poetry,” where she criticized the dominance of cultural studies in academia and called for “making the arts, rather than history, the umbrella of choice” in studying the humanities.

There are no obvious heirs to Vendler and Perloff in American poetry today. Given the trend lines for the humanities, it seems unlikely we will see a similar conjunction of scholarly authority and critical discernment anytime soon. But that is all the more reason for them to be remembered—together, for all their differences—as examples of how literary criticism, when practiced as a true vocation, can be one of the most exciting expressions of the life of the mind.