Poem fractal

Teresa Pashkowsky

by Edgar Lee Masters

23 August 1868 to 5 March 1950 (~82)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“What had enthralled me with Whitman was his conception of America as the field of a new art and music in which the people would be celebrated instead of kings.”

Reveals the democratic ideal that strongly shaped Masters's literary imagination · Across 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. D. H. Lawrence · −0.3955 + 0.8300i · 0.021 away · Compare side by side
  2. Charles Tennyson Turner · −0.4443 + 0.8250i · 0.028 away · Compare side by side
  3. J.G. Holland · −0.3983 + 0.8027i · 0.029 away · Compare side by side
  4. Charles Tennyson Turner · −0.4510 + 0.8196i · 0.035 away · Compare side by side
  5. Sir Aubrey de Vere · −0.4320 + 0.7852i · 0.044 away · Compare side by side
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