Poem fractal

Caliban in the Coal Mines

by Louis Untermeyer

1 October 1885 to 18 December 1977 (~92)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“A poet must be a passionate lover of language.”

Linking poetic achievement with an intense attention to words · Literary criticism (commonly attributed)

More remarks (10)

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. Mina Loy · −0.3845 − 0.7616i · 0.021 away · Compare side by side
  2. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · −0.4273 − 0.7646i · 0.026 away · Compare side by side
  3. D. H. Lawrence · −0.4223 − 0.7344i · 0.026 away · Compare side by side
  4. John Vance Cheney · −0.4147 − 0.7290i · 0.026 away · Compare side by side
  5. Emily Dickinson · −0.4022 − 0.7228i · 0.030 away · Compare side by side
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