Poem fractal

Natural Music

by Robinson Jeffers

10 January 1887 to 20 January 1962 (~75)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“If you like it, listen to it; if not, let it alone.”

Insisting poetry owes its audience nothing beyond its own beauty · Essay, Poetry, Gongorism, and a Thousand Years, New York Times, 1948

More remarks (8)

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. Walter Savage Landor · −0.2098 + 1.0867i · 0.040 away · Compare side by side
  2. Robert Browning · −0.2416 + 1.0696i · 0.051 away · Compare side by side
  3. Amelia Alderson Opie · −0.1784 + 1.1073i · 0.055 away · Compare side by side
  4. Edgar Lee Masters · −0.1799 + 1.0981i · 0.057 away · Compare side by side
  5. D. H. Lawrence · −0.2620 + 1.0644i · 0.063 away · Compare side by side
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