All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

"All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" is a poem by Richard Brautigan first published in his 1967 collection of the same name, his fifth book of poetry. It is an enthusiastic description of a technological utopia in which machines improve and protect the lives of humans. It is Brautigan's most frequently reprinted poem.

The poem describes a world in which "mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony", with technology acting as caretakers while "we are free of our labors and joined back to nature."

Most critics take the poem as a counterculture, communitarian adoption of Cold War-era technological visions. Brautigan's publisher, Claude Hayward, said it "caught me with its magical references to benign machines keeping order ... [which] fit right in with our optimism over the promise of the computer". In Vijay Nambisan's review for The Hindu in 2000, he said "You cannot write a poem like this today. It is too childlike, too innocent. Indeed, college friends who were moved by Brautigan's work twenty years ago would now laugh at me for choosing it. That's more or less what happened to Brautigan."

Others have interpreted it as an ironic, mocking critique of the technologically enabled utopia it purports to long for. According to Stanford's Carlos Seligo, there is an irony in the poem that "is as subtle and complex as his mixed metaphors", which Seligo says are "always doing at least three -- and often four, five, or six things at once." Robert J. Grangeware noted how unusual it is for American poets to take a positive view of our relationship with technology, but if viewed as ironic it "joins the mainstream of antitechnological American verse."

The poem was first published by the Communication Company in 1967, type-written on an 8.5-by-11-inch (216 by 279 mm) mimeographed broadside with both the title and imprint hand-written.

It was the title poem in the April 1967 collection of the same name, published in April 1967. 1,500 copies of the 36-page work were printed at the Communication Company, and all were given away for free.

It was included with the rest of the contents of the 1967 collection, along with other previously published collections and new material, in The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster (1968).

...
Wikipedia