Poem fractal

Surf

by Edmund Clarence Stedman

8 October 1833 to 18 January 1908 (~75)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“No work of art has real import, none endures, unless the maker has something to say.”

Expression without a thought worth uttering does not last · Lecture, The Nature and Elements of Poetry (1892)

More remarks (9)

Drawing the boundary…

Read the poem Another poem

A fractal is a shape that keeps its pattern when you look closer. Coastlines, trees, shells, and weather do this. A poem can be drawn the same way.

The poem’s constant is read from the build of its lines: their length, the size of the stanzas, and the share of vowels. Poems whose constants lie closer together are built more alike. The same poem always draws the same picture. Change the length of a line, the stanza, or the vowel share, and both the number and the picture move.

Primunia is the name for the source of that order: the pattern under the pattern, already there in a tree, a shell, and a verse.

Poems nearby in the constant

A smaller distance means the lines are built more alike.

  1. Wilfred Owen · −0.3447 + 0.2869i · 0.025 away · Compare side by side
  2. Patrick Reginald Chalmers · −0.3477 + 0.2692i · 0.025 away · Compare side by side
  3. Alfred Lord Tennyson · −0.3691 + 0.3104i · 0.028 away · Compare side by side
  4. Rupert Brooke · −0.3279 + 0.2669i · 0.044 away · Compare side by side
  5. Paul Laurence Dunbar · −0.3464 + 0.2433i · 0.045 away · Compare side by side
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