Poem fractal

Dreams in the Dusk

by Carl Sandburg

6 January 1878 to 22 July 1967 (~89)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands, and goes to work.”

Celebrating the vitality and practicality of everyday speech · Prose remark, commonly associated with The American Songbag

More remarks (4)

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. Hilda Doolittle · −0.7496 − 0.7488i · 0.020 away · Compare side by side
  2. Richard · −0.7328 − 0.7458i · 0.027 away · Compare side by side
  3. Wilfred Campbell · −0.7648 − 0.7653i · 0.037 away · Compare side by side
  4. Emily Dickinson · −0.7915 − 0.7157i · 0.040 away · Compare side by side
  5. Ralph Waldo Emerson · −0.7194 − 0.7582i · 0.045 away · Compare side by side
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