Poem fractal

Autumn Evening

by Ford Madox Hueffer

17 December 1873 to 26 June 1939 (~66)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“But the really great writer is not bound by the conventions of his day, nor, if he desires to give his reader a happy ending, need he select a wastrel like Jones as the recipient of his too easily bestowed favours.”

Great writers need not surrender their artistic judgement to contemporary convention · The English Novel

More remarks (36)

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. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · −0.4524 − 0.4730i · 0.009 away · Compare side by side
  2. Ralph Waldo Emerson · −0.4610 − 0.4875i · 0.010 away · Compare side by side
  3. Richard · −0.4383 − 0.4811i · 0.014 away · Compare side by side
  4. Thomas Hood · −0.4556 − 0.4615i · 0.021 away · Compare side by side
  5. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · −0.4419 − 0.5024i · 0.023 away · Compare side by side
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