Poem fractal

Inventory

by Dorothy Parker

22 August 1893 to 7 June 1967 (~74)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I haven't got a visual mind. I hear things.”

Describing her instinctive reliance on voices and dialogue when writing · Interview, The Paris Review, 1956

More remarks (43)

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 · 0.2566 − 0.3746i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
  2. Lewis Carroll · 0.2663 − 0.3472i · 0.034 away · Compare side by side
  3. Christina Rossetti · 0.2640 − 0.3884i · 0.036 away · Compare side by side
  4. Robert Browning · 0.2200 − 0.3322i · 0.036 away · Compare side by side
  5. Christina Rossetti · 0.2715 − 0.3489i · 0.038 away · Compare side by side
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