Poem fractal

Pantisocracy

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

21 October 1772 to 25 July 1834 (~62)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“If a man is not rising upwards to be an angel, depend upon it, he is sinking downwards to be a devil.”

A stark moral observation on the impossibility of moral stasis · Table Talk, 30 August 1833

More remarks (70)

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. Edwin J. Ellis · −0.1203 + 0.6568i · 0.005 away · Compare side by side
  2. William Soutar · −0.1149 + 0.6672i · 0.008 away · Compare side by side
  3. Theodore Tilton · −0.1101 + 0.6612i · 0.010 away · Compare side by side
  4. William Wordsworth · −0.1160 + 0.6508i · 0.012 away · Compare side by side
  5. Edna St. Vincent Millay · −0.1033 + 0.6564i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
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