Poem fractal

Send Her a Valentine

by Edgar A. Guest

20 August 1881 to 5 August 1959 (~78)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“If anybody'd give me a new idea, I'd kiss 'em.”

A humorous admission of the strain of producing verse at an extraordinary rate · Interview quoted in Time, 1951

More remarks (25)

Drawing the boundary…

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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. Robert Burns · 0.1693 − 0.3159i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
  2. Thomas Moore · 0.1653 − 0.2898i · 0.024 away · Compare side by side
  3. Christina Rossetti · 0.1432 − 0.2759i · 0.032 away · Compare side by side
  4. Aphra Behn · 0.1061 − 0.3120i · 0.043 away · Compare side by side
  5. Charlotte Brontë · 0.1922 − 0.3014i · 0.044 away · Compare side by side
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