Poem fractal

The Forest Reverie

by Edgar Allan Poe

19 January 1809 to 7 October 1849 (~40)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music without the idea is simply music; the idea without the music is prose from its very definitiveness.”

Distinguishing poetry as the union of music and idea · Letter to Mr. B—, preface to Poems, 1831

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. William Soutar · −0.7259 + 0.1748i · 0.034 away · Compare side by side
  2. Emily Dickinson · −0.6937 + 0.2337i · 0.063 away · Compare side by side
  3. Gerard Manley Hopkins · −0.7985 + 0.2444i · 0.067 away · Compare side by side
  4. Christina Rossetti · −0.6822 + 0.2370i · 0.075 away · Compare side by side
  5. Francis Ledwidge · −0.6789 + 0.1579i · 0.081 away · Compare side by side
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