Poem fractal

Despondency

by Matthew Arnold

24 December 1822 to 15 April 1888 (~66)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Literature is a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.”

Presenting literature as an ethically and aesthetically serious response to life · Preface to Poems (1853)

More remarks (4)

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. E. E. Cummings · −0.3279 − 0.5207i · 0.001 away · Compare side by side
  2. W. H. Davies · −0.3300 − 0.5205i · 0.003 away · Compare side by side
  3. Lord Byron · −0.3383 − 0.5389i · 0.021 away · Compare side by side
  4. Edna St. Vincent Millay · −0.3337 − 0.5436i · 0.023 away · Compare side by side
  5. John Clare · −0.3384 − 0.4968i · 0.027 away · Compare side by side
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