Poem fractal

The Haunted Palace

by Edgar Allan Poe

19 January 1809 to 7 October 1849 (~40)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“In getting my books, I have been always solicitous of an ample margin; this not so much through any love of the thing in itself, however agreeable, as for the facility it affords me of pencilling suggested thoughts.”

Explaining the practical and intellectual pleasure of annotating books · Preface to Marginalia, 1844

More remarks (39)

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. W.M. Herschell · −0.2840 − 0.4192i · 0.002 away · Compare side by side
  2. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey · −0.2899 − 0.4291i · 0.012 away · Compare side by side
  3. Arthur O'Shaughnessy · −0.2813 − 0.4077i · 0.013 away · Compare side by side
  4. Thomas Flatman · −0.2818 − 0.4342i · 0.014 away · Compare side by side
  5. Robert Burns · −0.2673 − 0.4118i · 0.017 away · Compare side by side
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