Poem fractal

The Pain of Sleep

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

21 October 1772 to 25 July 1834 (~62)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Not the poem which we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry.”

Defining the test of genuine poetry by the desire to re-read it · Biographia Literaria, Chapter I

More remarks (70)

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. William Butler Yeats · −0.3095 + 0.3997i · 0.016 away · Compare side by side
  2. A. A. Milne · −0.2968 + 0.3878i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
  3. Thomas MacDonagh · −0.3267 + 0.3606i · 0.027 away · Compare side by side
  4. David Melvill · −0.3245 + 0.4212i · 0.035 away · Compare side by side
  5. W. H. Davies · −0.2898 + 0.3659i · 0.035 away · Compare side by side
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