Poem fractal

Mrs. Meyers

by Edgar Lee Masters

23 August 1868 to 5 March 1950 (~82)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“The names I drew from both the Spoon River and the Sangamon River neighborhoods, combining first names here with surnames there.”

Revealing how remembered communities were reshaped through artistic invention · Essay, The Genesis of Spoon River (1933)

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. Edmund Waller · 0.1866 + 0.2732i · 0.011 away · Compare side by side
  2. Joaquin Miller · 0.1681 + 0.2679i · 0.012 away · Compare side by side
  3. Rudyard Kipling · 0.1944 + 0.2545i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
  4. William Morris · 0.1971 + 0.2392i · 0.031 away · Compare side by side
  5. Ralph Waldo Emerson · 0.1796 + 0.2314i · 0.033 away · Compare side by side
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