Poem fractal

Union Square

by Sara Teasdale

8 August 1884 to 29 January 1933 (~49)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Most poets find it easier to write about themselves than about anything else because they know more about themselves than about anything else.”

Locating the natural starting point of lyric poetry in self-knowledge · Statement on poetic craft, in Marguerite Wilkinson, New Voices, 1919

More remarks (47)

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 · −0.3525 − 0.4749i · 0.015 away · Compare side by side
  2. Grace Hazard Conkling · −0.3399 − 0.4827i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
  3. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · −0.3599 − 0.5077i · 0.019 away · Compare side by side
  4. John Clare · −0.3384 − 0.4968i · 0.019 away · Compare side by side
  5. John Donne · −0.3380 − 0.4778i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
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