Poem fractal

Song from 'Ajax and Ulysses.'

by James Shirley

September 1596 to 29 October 1666 (~70)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Poetry is the child of nature, which, regulated and made beautiful by art, presenteth the most harmonious of all other compositions; among which (if we rightly consider) the dramatical is the most absolute.”

Elevating drama as the highest form of poetry when nature is ordered by art · Preface to the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio (1647)

More remarks (1)

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. Alfred Lord Tennyson · −0.2522 − 0.2501i · 0.009 away · Compare side by side
  2. Wallace Stevens · −0.2308 − 0.2551i · 0.013 away · Compare side by side
  3. Anne Brontë · −0.2343 − 0.2385i · 0.016 away · Compare side by side
  4. Nora Hopper Chesson · −0.2476 − 0.2280i · 0.024 away · Compare side by side
  5. William Butler Yeats · −0.2648 − 0.2695i · 0.028 away · Compare side by side
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