poetry graphs

Poets pace
with line breaks

Try reading this excerpt from Robert Frost's "Fire and Ice" aloud. The white line is a rough sketch of the "pace" of the poem; notice how that's sensitive to how long the lines are.

...and also with
punctuation

This excerpt from Langston Hughes' "A Dream Deferred" has similiar line lengths, but as you read it out loud, notice how the punctuation changes the shape of the poem.

Try it yourself

Paste in a poem of your choice, then press the "create graph" button.

To personalize your graph, change parameters, then press the "update graph" button.

Line Color
Line Style
Line thickness
Fill Position
Fill Color
Fill Opacity
Points Shape
Points Size
Points Color
Point Line Thickness
Points Fill Color

(Behind the scenes)

First, your text is split into new lines and each line's number of syllables is found with the Rita.js text analysis library. Then, the information is processed to be a meaningful representation of "momentum," and then into a format the vis.js data visualization library understands. Finally, a "Graph2d" object is created based on that information.