Poem fractal

Another Weeping Woman

by Wallace Stevens

2 October 1879 to 2 August 1955 (~76)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.”

Treats difficulty as the condition that keeps life and art from becoming dull · Letter, 19 December 1935

More remarks (40)

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. George Reginald Margetson · 0.2783 − 0.9408i · 0.029 away · Compare side by side
  2. Ernest Dowson · 0.2883 − 0.9733i · 0.048 away · Compare side by side
  3. Hilda Doolittle · 0.3479 − 0.9545i · 0.051 away · Compare side by side
  4. A. A. Milne · 0.2873 − 0.8798i · 0.052 away · Compare side by side
  5. Emily Dickinson · 0.2735 − 0.8720i · 0.064 away · Compare side by side
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