Poem fractal

A Sunset

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

21 October 1772 to 25 July 1834 (~62)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“The secondary imagination I consider as an echo of the former.”

Explaining artistic creation as a transformative reworking of perception · Biographia Literaria

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. King James Bible · −0.3972 + 0.1275i · 0.003 away · Compare side by side
  2. Hartley Coleridge · −0.3855 + 0.1235i · 0.011 away · Compare side by side
  3. Matthew Arnold · −0.3831 + 0.1354i · 0.017 away · Compare side by side
  4. Ada Cambridge · −0.4114 + 0.1394i · 0.021 away · Compare side by side
  5. Patrick Reginald Chalmers · −0.3751 + 0.1000i · 0.033 away · Compare side by side
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