Poem fractal

Isaiah Beethoven

by Edgar Lee Masters

23 August 1868 to 5 March 1950 (~82)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I wanted to awaken that American vision, that love of liberty which the best men of the Republic strove to win for us, and to bequeath to time.”

States the civic and patriotic purpose he associated with his most famous work · The Genesis of Spoon River

More remarks (37)

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. Mary Lamb · −0.1479 + 1.2958i · 0.023 away · Compare side by side
  2. Humbert Wolfe · −0.1403 + 1.2972i · 0.023 away · Compare side by side
  3. Thomas Hardy · −0.1817 + 1.3202i · 0.033 away · Compare side by side
  4. Edgar Lee Masters · −0.1375 + 1.2860i · 0.035 away · Compare side by side
  5. Alan Seeger · −0.1874 + 1.3684i · 0.063 away · Compare side by side
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