Poem fractal

The Future

by Sydney Dobell

5 April 1824 to 22 August 1874 (~50)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Art, though it cannot hope to produce Truth, is an aspiration and effort towards Truth, and must therefore be essentially uncongenial with lying.”

Presenting art as an ethical movement towards truth rather than imitation alone · Unpublished notes, Poetry and Art

More remarks (84)

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. Edna St. Vincent Millay · −0.5667 + 0.6696i · 0.008 away · Compare side by side
  2. Edna St. Vincent Millay · −0.5602 + 0.6614i · 0.011 away · Compare side by side
  3. John Milton · −0.5621 + 0.6710i · 0.012 away · Compare side by side
  4. Dylan Thomas · −0.5512 + 0.6747i · 0.023 away · Compare side by side
  5. Edna St. Vincent Millay · −0.5478 + 0.6735i · 0.026 away · Compare side by side
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