The objective of this study is to investigate how the use of ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence, in a university English literature class affects students’ perceptions of this technology. Specifically, the study focuses on the students’ experiences with ChatGPT during an English poem writing activity, in which two approaches were employed. The first approach involved students creating their own English poems using an English dictionary, while the second approach required students to use ChatGPT to rephrase their self-translated poems and edit the resulting output. The results indicated that students found the structured English poem writing activity at a basic level to be easy, but they preferred ChatGPT’s faster and more convenient process and its use of natural and sophisticated vocabulary, grammar, and poetic expression with poetic license. Students also reported that post-editing with ChatGPT resulted in more seamless and higher quality outputs than direct translation. They noted that ChatGPT helped improve their English writing and translation skills, sentence structure and grammar checking, appropriate vocabulary selection and usage, natural sentence expression, and colloquial conversation.