Poem fractal

Implication

by Louis Untermeyer

1 October 1885 to 18 December 1977 (~92)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“The poet is a man who puts up a fight against the obvious.”

Presenting poetry as resistance to habitual ways of seeing · Essay on poetry (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. Edward James Mortimer Collins · 0.1804 + 0.1061i · 0.016 away · Compare side by side
  2. Edna St. Vincent Millay · 0.1997 + 0.0912i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
  3. Thomas Moore · 0.1870 + 0.1268i · 0.020 away · Compare side by side
  4. Charles Kingsley · 0.1718 + 0.0952i · 0.028 away · Compare side by side
  5. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. · 0.1775 + 0.1345i · 0.032 away · Compare side by side
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