Poem fractal

Spleen

by Charles Baudelaire

9 April 1821 to 31 August 1867 (~46)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Le génie n’est que l’enfance retrouvée à volonté.”

Presenting creative genius as the deliberate recovery of childhood’s vision · Essay, Le Peintre de la vie moderne

More remarks (4)

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. Francis Pilkington · 0.3442 + 0.1361i · 0.012 away · Compare side by side
  2. Wilfred Owen · 0.3256 + 0.1449i · 0.028 away · Compare side by side
  3. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley · 0.3402 + 0.1518i · 0.028 away · Compare side by side
  4. John Donne · 0.3586 + 0.0851i · 0.042 away · Compare side by side
  5. Mary Lamb · 0.3341 + 0.1677i · 0.045 away · Compare side by side
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