Poem fractal

Paris in Spring

by Sara Teasdale

8 August 1884 to 29 January 1933 (~49)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“The first line comes floating toward him with a charming definiteness of color and music.”

Evoking the mysterious arrival of a poem's opening line · 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. Edgar Lee Masters · −0.5505 − 0.5089i · 0.007 away · Compare side by side
  2. Arthur O'Shaughnessy · −0.5264 − 0.5140i · 0.030 away · Compare side by side
  3. James Russell Lowell · −0.5251 − 0.4965i · 0.035 away · Compare side by side
  4. Joanna Baillie · −0.5224 − 0.4946i · 0.038 away · Compare side by side
  5. Francis Hastings Doyle · −0.5278 − 0.5410i · 0.040 away · Compare side by side
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