Poem fractal

The Weary Blues

by Langston Hughes

1 February 1902 to 22 May 1967 (~65)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“They do not particularly care whether they are like white folks or anybody else.”

Admiring people whose sense of self is not governed by imitation or social approval · Essay, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain

More remarks (92)

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. Alfred Austin · 0.1345 + 0.5971i · 0.017 away · Compare side by side
  2. Edna St. Vincent Millay · 0.1388 + 0.5955i · 0.021 away · Compare side by side
  3. Anna Hempstead Branch · 0.1465 + 0.5945i · 0.028 away · Compare side by side
  4. Edna St. Vincent Millay · 0.1556 + 0.5812i · 0.038 away · Compare side by side
  5. Hartley Coleridge · 0.1570 + 0.6149i · 0.045 away · Compare side by side
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