Poem fractal

The Raven

by Edgar Allan Poe

19 January 1809 to 7 October 1849 (~40)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating, and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the Beautiful.”

Identifying the contemplation of beauty as the purest form of pleasure · Essay, The Poetic Principle

More remarks (39)

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. Thomas Hardy · −0.2999 + 1.1062i · 0.032 away · Compare side by side
  2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge · −0.3348 + 1.1341i · 0.034 away · Compare side by side
  3. D. H. Lawrence · −0.3194 + 1.2041i · 0.068 away · Compare side by side
  4. Robinson Jeffers · −0.2320 + 1.1200i · 0.071 away · Compare side by side
  5. Dylan Thomas · −0.3472 + 1.0754i · 0.078 away · Compare side by side
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