Poem fractal

In the Past

by Trumbull Stickney

20 June 1874 to 11 October 1904 (~30)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“You refer to the last thing excavated on classic soil, my own torso. It proves not to be an antique at all, but a work of a New England sculptor who was wrecked in a dory off the Peloponnesian Coast.”

A wry, self-deprecating picture of his divided classical, European and New England identity · Letter to Henry Adams, 1903

More remarks (1)

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. Grace Fallow Norton · −0.2541 − 0.7021i · 0.005 away · Compare side by side
  2. Arthur Macy · −0.2644 − 0.6987i · 0.014 away · Compare side by side
  3. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · −0.2668 − 0.6990i · 0.016 away · Compare side by side
  4. Mary Robinson · −0.2631 − 0.6945i · 0.016 away · Compare side by side
  5. William Ernest Henley · −0.2701 − 0.7000i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
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