Poem fractal

My Heritage

by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

5 November 1850 to 30 October 1919 (~69)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“If I were one hundred years old, and in possession of my faculties, I would not hesitate to undertake a new enterprise which offered a hope of bettering my condition.”

A memorable declaration of lifelong willingness to begin again · Essay, The Heart of the New Thought

More remarks (277)

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. Edmund Clarence Stedman · 0.3405 + 0.0668i · 0.010 away · Compare side by side
  2. Arthur O'Shaughnessy · 0.3257 + 0.0331i · 0.027 away · Compare side by side
  3. Anne Whitney · 0.3439 + 0.0269i · 0.031 away · Compare side by side
  4. Amy Lowell · 0.3234 + 0.0294i · 0.031 away · Compare side by side
  5. John Donne · 0.3586 + 0.0851i · 0.035 away · Compare side by side
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