Poem fractal

A Dream

by Edgar Allan Poe

19 January 1809 to 7 October 1849 (~40)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I have no faith in human perfectability. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active — not more happy — nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.”

Rejecting the idea of progressive human improvement across history · Letter to James Russell Lowell, 2 July 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. Ezra Pound · −0.4019 − 0.6841i · 0.010 away · Compare side by side
  2. T. S. Eliot · −0.4158 − 0.6673i · 0.012 away · Compare side by side
  3. Robert Burns · −0.4140 − 0.6934i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
  4. Paul Laurence Dunbar · −0.4233 − 0.6626i · 0.020 away · Compare side by side
  5. George Marion McClellan · −0.4293 − 0.6813i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
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