Soon he was certain that every poem in his new collection—and, indeed, everything that made him the man he was—could be indicated on the same set of crystalline axes. It was, in short, a snowflake that mapped out the spiritual course of every person who had ever lived. The three axes onto which he mapped his poems—Memory, Imagination, and Reason—were, he said, inspired by the classifications in Bacon’s tree of knowledge, but he wrote extensively about his own efforts to elucidate the meaning of the six-pronged snowflake’s nineteen points.
