Poem fractal

The Fascination of What's Difficult

by William Butler Yeats

13 June 1865 to 28 January 1939 (~74)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from every abstract thing, from all that is of the brain only.”

Celebrating art as an embodied encounter with the sensory world rather than pure abstraction · Essay, The Thinking of the Body

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. James Edwin Campbell · −0.2269 + 0.5963i · 0.026 away · Compare side by side
  2. John Keats · −0.2377 + 0.5462i · 0.026 away · Compare side by side
  3. Christina Rossetti · −0.1982 + 0.5752i · 0.030 away · Compare side by side
  4. Alan Seeger · −0.2487 + 0.5414i · 0.036 away · Compare side by side
  5. Elizabeth Craven · −0.1807 + 0.5657i · 0.048 away · Compare side by side
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