Poem fractal

Beautiful Dreamer

by Stephen Collins Foster

4 July 1826 to 13 January 1864 (~38)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I have done a great deal to build up a taste for the Ethiopian songs among refined people by making the words suitable to their taste, instead of the trashy and really offensive words which belong to some songs of that order.”

Explaining his effort to elevate minstrel songs toward greater refinement and dignity · Letter to E. P. Christy, 25 May 1852

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. Arthur Rimbaud · 0.6270 + 0.0667i · 0.023 away · Compare side by side
  2. Conrad Aiken · 0.6052 + 0.0739i · 0.037 away · Compare side by side
  3. D. H. Lawrence · 0.5869 + 0.0285i · 0.043 away · Compare side by side
  4. Sir Thomas More · 0.6618 + 0.0994i · 0.065 away · Compare side by side
  5. Robert Jones · 0.6921 + 0.0554i · 0.066 away · Compare side by side
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