Poem fractal

The Placid Pug

by Alfred Douglas

22 October 1870 to 20 March 1945 (~75)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“However much I may like a man or a woman, and however much I may desire to please him or her, I will not say that he or she has written good poetry unless I really think it.”

Putting critical sincerity above friendship or the desire to please · The Autobiography of Lord Alfred Douglas, 1929

More remarks (20)

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. Samuel Taylor Coleridge · −0.5136 + 0.1119i · 0.009 away · Compare side by side
  2. Stephen Hawes · −0.5182 + 0.0957i · 0.011 away · Compare side by side
  3. William Alexander · −0.4936 + 0.1020i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
  4. Caroline Elizabeth Sheridan · −0.5275 + 0.0891i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
  5. Leigh Hunt · −0.5121 + 0.0812i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
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