Complex systems philosophy and emergence — the principle that properties arise in systems that are not present in, or predictable from, their components — has influenced poets who use procedural and generative methods, where the poem's meaning emerges from the method rather than being planned by the author; In Whitman's democratic poetics, a kind of social emergence is implied — the democratic collective exceeds and differs from the sum of its individual members, just as the emergent self of "Song of Myself" exceeds the biographical individual; A poet writing about ecosystems might invoke emergence philosophically — the self-organizing beauty of a flock of starlings (murmuration), the complex behavior emerging from simple rules — as an image of how complexity can arise without a designer; Pound's concept of the ideogram — where meaning is produced by the juxtaposition of concrete images rather than by abstract statement — is an emergentist poetics: meaning emerges from the constellation of particulars rather than being imposed from above by conceptual argument; William Carlos Williams's "no ideas but in things" is a philosophical claim about emergence — the general (the idea) must emerge from the particular (the thing), not be applied to it from outside; Contemporary network poetics, influenced by complexity theory and emergence, treats the poem as a system in which meaning emerges from the interactions between elements — sound, image, syntax, cultural reference — rather than being located in any single element