Poem fractal

In an Omnibus

by Arthur Symons

28 February 1865 to 22 January 1945 (~80)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Symbolism, in literature, is the expression of the unseen by means of the visible.”

Defining art as a passage from visible forms to inward realities · Essay, The Symbolist Movement in Literature

More remarks (31)

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. William Butler Yeats · 0.1689 − 0.7017i · 0.009 away · Compare side by side
  2. Christina Rossetti · 0.1951 − 0.7186i · 0.023 away · Compare side by side
  3. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · 0.1656 − 0.6817i · 0.025 away · Compare side by side
  4. Ralph Waldo Emerson · 0.2052 − 0.7100i · 0.028 away · Compare side by side
  5. Archibald MacLeish · 0.1503 − 0.7152i · 0.030 away · Compare side by side
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