Poem fractal

Joy

by Sara Teasdale

8 August 1884 to 29 January 1933 (~49)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I have no theories about poetry. I write because I must, and I write what I feel.”

Expressing poetry as an inward necessity rather than a literary programme · Interview and correspondence, commonly attributed

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. Thomas Hardy · −0.1449 − 0.5287i · 0.007 away · Compare side by side
  2. T. S. Eliot · −0.1561 − 0.5366i · 0.014 away · Compare side by side
  3. William Wordsworth · −0.1499 − 0.5446i · 0.021 away · Compare side by side
  4. William Butler Yeats · −0.1711 − 0.5122i · 0.024 away · Compare side by side
  5. Philip Arthur Larkin · −0.1351 − 0.5433i · 0.025 away · Compare side by side
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