Poem fractal

To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing

by William Butler Yeats

13 June 1865 to 28 January 1939 (~74)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Ordinary speech is formless, and its variety is like the variety which separates bad prose from the regulated speech of Milton.”

Arguing that artistic speech requires deliberate form rather than mere natural variation · Essay, Speaking to the Psaltery

More remarks (81)

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. Alfred Lord Tennyson · −0.2522 − 0.2501i · 0.023 away · Compare side by side
  2. Ralph Waldo Emerson · −0.2871 − 0.2772i · 0.024 away · Compare side by side
  3. Winthrop Mackworth Praed · −0.2870 − 0.2816i · 0.025 away · Compare side by side
  4. James Shirley · −0.2434 − 0.2516i · 0.028 away · Compare side by side
  5. Joseph Addison · −0.2745 − 0.3026i · 0.034 away · Compare side by side
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