Poem fractal

The First Birth Day

by Hartley Coleridge

19 September 1796 to 6 January 1849 (~53)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I find great difficulty in acquiring the staid, philosophic style required for the Essay on Poetry.”

Admitting the strain of fitting a lively mind to formal critical prose · Letter to Derwent Coleridge, 1826

More remarks (49)

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. Sara Teasdale · −0.7405 + 0.6900i · 0.058 away · Compare side by side
  2. Mary Coleridge · −0.6596 + 0.6763i · 0.087 away · Compare side by side
  3. Wilfrid Wilson Gibson · −0.6992 + 0.5483i · 0.091 away · Compare side by side
  4. Edgar Allan Poe · −0.6596 + 0.5798i · 0.092 away · Compare side by side
  5. Dylan Thomas · −0.6322 + 0.6286i · 0.103 away · Compare side by side
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