Poem fractal

Keep Your Dreams

by Edgar A. Guest

20 August 1881 to 5 August 1959 (~78)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I am a newspaperman who writes verse.”

A modest description of his vocation that deliberately resists the grander title of poet · Statement quoted in Time, 1959

More remarks (25)

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 · −0.1419 − 0.8799i · 0.017 away · Compare side by side
  2. Emily Dickinson · −0.1768 − 0.8569i · 0.025 away · Compare side by side
  3. Amy Levy · −0.1865 − 0.8875i · 0.034 away · Compare side by side
  4. Clifford Bax · −0.1674 − 0.8393i · 0.034 away · Compare side by side
  5. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · −0.1368 − 0.9002i · 0.034 away · Compare side by side
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