Poem fractal

Casabianca

by Felicia Dorothea Hemans

25 September 1793 to 16 May 1835 (~42)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I dare say you laugh sometimes, as I am inclined to do myself, at the prevailing mania for autographs.”

Gently mocking the nineteenth-century appetite for literary celebrity · Letter to Mary Russell Mitford, 6 June 1827

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. Hart Crane · −0.3709 − 0.6438i · 0.005 away · Compare side by side
  2. Oscar Wilde · −0.3844 − 0.6401i · 0.012 away · Compare side by side
  3. Lewis Carroll · −0.3907 − 0.6179i · 0.028 away · Compare side by side
  4. Herman Melville · −0.3970 − 0.6538i · 0.028 away · Compare side by side
  5. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · −0.4042 − 0.6426i · 0.031 away · Compare side by side
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