Poem fractal

To a Friend

by William Lisle Bowles

24 September 1762 to 7 April 1850 (~88)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“They have been distinguished for pourtraying the passions of the human heart, rather than manners of particular periods of society.”

Great poetry, for him, treats elemental feeling rather than fashionable social types · The Invariable Principles of Poetry, 1819

More remarks (18)

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. Archibald MacLeish · −0.5238 + 0.6490i · 0.017 away · Compare side by side
  2. Christina Rossetti · −0.4895 + 0.6268i · 0.024 away · Compare side by side
  3. Robert Williams Buchanan · −0.4732 + 0.6296i · 0.038 away · Compare side by side
  4. Edna St. Vincent Millay · −0.5053 + 0.6776i · 0.038 away · Compare side by side
  5. Walt Whitman · −0.4972 + 0.5961i · 0.045 away · Compare side by side
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