higgins pattern poetry

Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

Pattern Poetry as ParadigmAuthor(s): Dick HigginsSource: Poetics Today, Vol. 10, No. 2, Art and Literature II (Summer, 1989), pp. 401-428Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1773030 .

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Pattern Poetry as Paradigm

Dick Higgins Fine Arts, Williams

The State of Knowledge of Pattern Poetry From roughly the eighteenth century until the 1970s, pattern poetry, that is, poetry in which a visual image is formed by the placement of words or letters, when it received any attention at all, was strongly under attack by almost all critics and observers. This was not because of its mimesis, since until the early twentieth century most visual art was itself mimetic. Rather, the feeling was that the pattern poem was intermedial, that it lay conceptually between the literary and visual art media, and that it was therefore unable to stand on its own and was thus inherently mediocre. In recent years, however, many of our own artists, literary as well as visual, have explored the potentials of the intermedia-sound poetry, the happening, concrete and postconcrete poetry, and so on-and, in due course, attention has been given to earlier intermedial works, suggesting a fairly widespread taste for such forms at present. Emblem poetry, previously ignored or denigrated by most observers up to the 1950s, was reevaluated by Mario Praz (1964) and others in the 1960s and since (see, e.g., Hatherly 1983 and Pozzi 1981). The same appears to be happening with pattern poetry.

Just to describe the situation in the United States, when I wrote a little monograph on George Herbert's pattern poems (Higgins 1977), I could find almost nothing on pattern poetry as such in English- a chapter here or there (Hollander 1975), but nothing substantial. A little book by Kenneth Newell (1976) had been published, but by an extremely obscure press; it was unlisted in the usual sources, and I knew of it only later when I found a copy of it in the New York Pub-

Poetics Today 10:2 (Summer 1989). Copyright ? 1989 The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. ccc 0333-5372/89/$2.50.



402 Poetics Today 10:2

lic Library. But since the late 1970s there have appeared no fewer than seven books internationally, including my own attempt to document as many pattern poems and their analogues (and works dealing with these) as possible in both European and non-European languages (Higgins 1987). There have been at least three small exhibitions of pattern poetry; I know of five major ones that have been planned (most including modern visual poetry as well as pattern poems); Wolfen- buttel's celebrated Herzog-August-Bibliothek hosted a conference in

September 1987; Visible Language has done a special issue on pattern poetry (Higgins 1986); and the bibliography of Higgins 1987 lists, among its over two thousand items, perhaps sixty publications since 1982 which deal with pattern poetry. What can justify all this attention to an area in which the actual masterpieces are rather few, and in which most pieces are obscure ones by minor artists, hardly intended to last until the next year, let alone until eternity?

The answer lies, I feel, in four factors: (1) There are more master-

pieces in pattern poetry than has generally been realized, but there is, as yet, no consensus on what constitutes appropriate evaluative criteria. (2) The cultural dimension of pattern poetry is incredibly rich.

Perhaps as a result of the obscurity of the medium, the poet has generally known some but not very much of the work of his predecessors; detecting these patternings of information and tradition is a reflexive

process that says much about the nature of such patternings which could not be so easily revealed by other formal studies, such as an in-

vestigation of the various varieties of the sonnet. Taken synchronically, the pieces suggest cultural contacts among contemporaries. Viewed

diachronically, they are indicators of the knowledge of earlier forms, building up historical models of reception and alteration which have an intrinsic interest. (3) To the extent that pattern poetry is occasional verse, the study of its genres, language, and visual forms reveals much about the people associated with it, poets as well as dedicatees and

poetic communities. Most pattern poems are popular literature, and to study those that are tells us much not only about literary history and taste but also about the social history of their times. Pieces which are not particularly intended as occasional verse, especially those from the Renaissance and the baroque period (when the taste for pattern poetry was at its peak), are often by learned poets and thus offer in-

sight into the intellectual history of their times. (4) The pattern poem, because it is not a pure form but an intermedial one, offers a sort of

multiple access to those who wish to work with historical or aesthetic

paradigms. A pattern poem can be approached as visual art, as verbal text, or as a whole. Later we shall see an example of this multiple access in the mystery surrounding the authorship of an arma Christi

poem that appears in a work by Edward Benlowes (1603?-76) but ap-



Higgins * Pattern Poetry as Paradigm 403

pears to be by Samuel Pomarius (sixteenth century?). The question of

originality or nonoriginality in which the piece is embedded seems, somehow, to sum up many aspects of the four areas.

To obtain a consensus among recipients of the pieces-critics, scholars, lay readers-we would need not just a common vocabulary and evaluative criteria, together with a number of pieces which we agreed were superb (though perhaps for different reasons). We would also need a double semiotic of the pieces: a semiotic about what the pieces and their images, whether visual or verbal, for instance, meant to the times from which the pieces emerge, and some common semiotic by which we could discuss what the pieces are to us, as indicators of all aspects of their meaning. So far, this is lacking. Thus, anything we

say now has to be regarded as tentative; the material is known,' but it will take more than just us, the first generation of scholars who have worked in this area, to say what it is or what it means. Further- more, pattern poetry cannot yet convincingly be related to the recent visual poetries, from Mallarm6, the futurists, or the dadaists up to Ian Hamilton Finlay, Timm Ulrichs, Jean-Frangois Bory, or Franz Mon, since most of these poems are nonmimetic (or represent processes rather than things), so that their visual aspect generally seems of a different order than is usual with pattern poetry.2

So much for an overview of the current knowledge of pattern poetry. Now let us turn to the four areas mentioned above.

What Constitutes a Good Pattern Poem? If we try to claim excellence for a pattern poem because of its language, we get into trouble immediately. Angot's (1581-?) lute-shaped piece (Angot 1977 [1872]) is doggerel, yet visually it is exciting and satisfying (Figure 1). My taste tells me it is a good piece, although its language is rather weak. Why? Because, though the words are weak and the visual form strong, beyond that there is some determinant of quality which is neither: a sort of historical sense that it was (and is) unusual for a poem to resemble a lute, physically, and that it required

1. Higgins 1987 documents about two thousand pattern poems from European literatures plus cognate pieces from Asiatic ones, as well as such related forms as proteus poems, shaped prose, and graphic musical notations. It also contains 170 illustrations. 2. For example, virtually all labyrinth poems are nonmimetic. Again, the small festschrift Petersen 1679 includes a poem with five particles, one in the center and the others centered on the lines of a square, each of which modifies the word in the center differently. Such a piece resembles the work of the Noigandres group of concrete poets in Brazil in the 1950s and 1960s. The piece appears in Higgins 1987. On the other hand, most of the "calligrammes" of Apollinaire are mimetic, unlike most of the visual poems of the futurists, dadaists, constructivists, and more recent groups.




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some degree of inventiveness on the poet's part to come up with the

concept of a lute-shaped poem, especially since originality as such was not prized in Angot's time.

If we try to claim excellence because of the visual quality of a piece, we get into almost as much trouble. George Herbert's "Easter Wings"

(Herbert 1977b [1633]) is made of excellent lines of verse of varying

length (Figure 2), the whole comprising two pairs of wings in the same manner as the single pair of wings authored by Simias of Rhodes (fl. 300 B.C.E.; see Figure 3).3 Yet Robert Massin (1970: 184), the emi-

3. Simias's poem, like most of the Greek technopeignia, is riddle verse and extremely allusive, and it is correspondingly difficult to build up a consensus on its meaning; in addition, the technopeignia were transmitted in very corrupt texts. Currently, the most accepted reading is that in Gow 1958, and the best versions known today are those in the Loeb Classics series, which are slightly different. But obviously these readings were unknown to Herbert, who may well have known

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nent French graphic designer, when comparing Herbert's poem to the works of Benlowes (1652) as described by Butler (1908), dismissed this "verse exercise" as "pretty feeble" because it is visually naive, perhaps not knowing that the piece has proved one of the most loved of Herbert's poems. In other words, shape alone does not determine the excellence of a piece.

Finally, it is not an absolute requirement that shape and text inter- relate in a visual poem; Herbert's poem contains such a relation but Simias's does not. The "most thinne" line of Herbert is one of the two shortest, while Simias's center lines are just part of the flow. Yet

such a version as that in Crespin 1569 or such popular earlier versions as that in the untitled edition of Theocritus 1516, at which time the technopeignias were all ascribed to Theocritus. The first to work seriously on cleaning up the mess with the

technopeignias was Fortunio Liceti (1577-1654), whose over forty published works include one on each of the technopeignias (the one on Simias's egg is lost). The work on the wings is Liceti 1640, whose date precludes Herbert's having known it but which surely covers whatever versions he did know. More work should be done on these early corrupt texts, full of interpolations though they are, to document their influence.




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Simias's poem is also considered excellent by most readers (cf. "Wings of love worn by virtuous women," by Jean Grisel [sixteenth century], reproduced in Massin 1970: 184), and its popularity over more than two thousand years bears this out.

Might it not be true of visual poetry, as of other poetic forms and other artistic forms in general, that there is no single determinant, or even pair of determinants, of excellence? There must be a whole list of determinants, no one of which need predominate, some more applicable to visual aspects of the piece, some more to social or purely literary aspects, and perhaps even some to areas peculiar to the inter- medium as such. For instance, when one reads a visual poem, one tends to be more conscious of the physical act of reading than when one reads normative verse or looks at pictures of visual artworks. Thus, Herbert's poem is to some extent a notation for an act of reading, much as a musical score is a notation for a musical performance. In- deed, the quality of notation may be one determinant of excellence




in some pieces, though obviously not in all. Surely there are other possibilities.

How One Wave of Pattern Poetry Influences Another Sometime around 845 C.E., Hrabanus Maurus (784-856), one of the main poets of the Carolingian court and also the abbot of Fulda, wrote his De Laudibus Sanctae Crucis,4 a work which contains thirty "carmina cancellata" (canceled poems), a kind of mesostic pattern poem (Figure 4) based on a rectangle within which visual images at least partly cancel out letters from their backgrounds to form "intexts" (from the Latin intextus, "woven"). The work includes no shaped poems, as such, but it is close to the carmen cancellatum of St. Boniface (680-755), those of Venantius Fortunatus (ca. 530-600), and those of Optatian (fl. ca. 325 C.E.), court poet of Constantine the Great, with whom the form begins, though Optatian's pieces are far simpler and sometimes described as "carmina quadrata" (square poems). From the text alone we could not see a train of awareness, but from the visual structure we can trace a chain of influence from Optatian through Hrabanus. Hrabanus must have consciously modeled his poems on these poets, all of whom were clearly Christian. Were no other models available? Well, a number of Hrabanus's pieces use Greek letters- alpha, omega, and lambda. It may be that he spoke Greek, a rare skill at the time. Optatian himself made a poem in the tradition of the Greek altar-shaped pattern poems, and also a regal-a primitive organ-which resembles the Greek syrinx-shaped poems. Very likely Hrabanus was aware of these poems, but he chose not to base his poems on anything even remotely resembling pagan models. Given the general wave of bigotry and fanaticism which swept over the Holy Roman Empire under Louis the Pious when Hrabanus was working, and given that, for example, Louis ordered destroyed the massive, largely pre-Christian collection of Frankish epic poems, songs, and music which Charlemagne had lovingly collected in a more tolerant day, is it not plausible to relate Hrabanus's use of only Christian models to the mood of his time, even to see this choice as an expression of it?

Hrabanus's work exists in three complete manuscripts and some fragmentary ones; evidently it was highly regarded throughout the Middle Ages. It was first published at Pforzheim in 1503 by Thomas Anselm, one of the famous printers there who were the first to print whole books in roman typefaces rather than in blackletter. As such, this book was sought after and admired (and is again today among bibliophiles; the illustrations are reproduced in Massin 1970: 184).

4. For a fairly full account of the bibliography of De Laudibus Sanctae Crucis, manuscripts, and so on, see the Medieval Latin section of Higgins 1987. The Vienna version, "Codex Vinobadensis 652," is available in a facsimile as Maurus 1970.




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Though its reputation waned somewhat, in the seventeenth century it was still being read. However, in the baroque period there was a

great wave of popularity for another kind of rectangular poem, the

labyrinth, in which there is a multiplicity of ways either to read the

poem or to present its texts.

The origin of labyrinths is obscure .5 They appealed to the more

5. The traditional view is that they come from eitherJewish or Christian cabalism, both of which were popular at the time. They may also come from the Tabulae Iliacae, carved at Rome around the t Cr time f Christ, on the backs of which near labyrinths appear. Besides Higgins 1987, sources of more detailed information are the




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erudite poets of the time, among them August II, duke of Liineburg- Braunschweig (1579-1666), founder of the Herzog-August-Biblio- thek. Under the pseudonym Gustavus Selenus, he authored a very famous book on codes and puzzles, the Cryptomenytices et Cryptographiae ... Libri 9 (1624), which includes labyrinths, poems by Hrabanus and Optatian, among others (August 1624: 140), and some blank forms for labyrinths thought to be by one Daniel Klesel (Figure 5) which were rather widely reprinted in other works throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (see Sutor 1740: 770) and are usually ascribed by critics today to the authors of the work. (The resulting biblio- graphical mess can be straightened out only by sorting out the works in question, comparing labyrinths and dates of publication, so that the

massive Kern 1982, only part of which deals with literary labyrinths; Rypson 1986; and Hatherly 1983, which centers on labyrinths because, for whatever reason, most surviving Portuguese visual poems of the past are labyrinths.

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correct authorship can be identified.) By checking through works of this sort from the point of view of pattern poetry, one can see that even in the seventeenth century Hrabanus's work was available to those who wished to look for it.6 As for August's grid poems, when they are not known, it seems to be necessary to reinvent them. For example, they are very similar to those of the Darmstadt school of concrete poets- whose membership included Claus Bremer, Daniel Spoerri, and most

6. Hrabanus was known and being cited or anthologized in Poland and the Ukraine, then under Polish influence, though already under Russian rule, in the

eighteenth century. Selenus (August) and Trithemius were also known.



Higgins * Pattern Poetry as Paradigm 41 1

notably Emmett Williams (1975: 52-81)-which flourished in the late 1950s (Figure 6). But of course, just how this model of awareness works is something that the theoreticians will have to work out; all we can do is to show that the echoes and reprinting are facts. When this process is completely understood, we will be able to say, "Once there was poem A, which was subsequently seen by another poet as A', who either developed it or cited it with a new function when he made his poem B." Creative misinterpretation has always been a part of poetic influence, and pattern poetry provides good paradigms for comprehending it.

Traditions of Pattern Poetry As for pattern poetry as occasional verse, such poetry in general has a bad name. Most of us assume that the best poetry is intended to last into eternity, whereas, in fact, many pieces, even some by major poets, are intended only to capture the spirit of some moment or occa- sion. Pattern poetry, with its potential for heraldic imagery and such, seems particularly well suited to do so;7 in fact, modern advertising has recognized this and often uses shaped prose for graphic impact (see Massin 1970 for French examples). Even in the nineteenth century, when the serious pattern poem was all but forgotten and most reactions to it were very hostile (Higgins 1987: ch. 1), the medium lived on in folk and popular literature, which includes advertising literature. The poem "To My Honored Friend," by Matthew Stevenson (1986 [1654]), a regret that the poet's barber has moved away, must surely rank among the worst poems in the English language; its language is flat and its shapes, a set of three lozenges, are rather dull. But that Stevenson wrote it at all suggests that there were other poems of its sort around, some of which have not survived, that were worth imitating.

On the other hand, still in popular literature, Prison Pietie (1677), by Samuel Speed (1631-82), includes three pattern poems, "The Altar" (Figure 7), "The Cross," and "The Bible." Speed, a sometime stationer at St. Dunstan's and a bookseller at The Rainbow in Fleet Street, was arrested and imprisoned in 1666 for publishing and selling seditious books. Both his surviving works, the "Fragmenta carceris" and the book of poetry, reflect this experience. The poems have inspired im- passioned denunciation from academic critics for their imitativeness in comparison with George Herbert, who also wrote an altar poem (Figure 8; Herbert 1977a [1633]), and Robert Herrick, who wrote a cruciform one. What one can reply here is that Speed used good

7. Heraldic images were particularly popular in Polish pattern poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; no such images are known in English.




( The Altar.

A broken A L TA R, Lord, to thee I raife, Made of a Heart, toec?lcbrate thy praife:

Thou, tltat the onely Workman art, That canft cement a brokeri heart.

For fuch is mine, 0 make it thine Take out the Sin That's hid therein. Though it be Stone, Make it to groan; That fo the fame May praife thy Name.

Melt it , 0 Lord , I thee defire , With Flames from thy Celcflial fire; _

That it may ever fpeak thy Praife alone, Since thou haft changed into Flefh a Stone.

Figure 7. Samuel Speed, "The Altar," 1677.

models, that his work, however crude, overflows with sincerity, and that it is an excellent example of what we today call prison literature. Somehow it enhances Herbert and Herrick that their forms could be adapted by Speed to an honest expression of joy at his salvation or reform.

Finally, the shapes of pattern poetry have their own traditions. For example, pyramids are normally used to celebrate someone or something. When they are inverted, however, they express grief or the opposite of what they express right side up; hence their use by the En- glish Roman Catholic Richard Willis (ca. 1545-1600) at a time when his church was repressed (Ernst 1982: 308). The various uses of the



Higgins * Pattern Poetry as Paradigm

The Altar.

A broken ALTAR, Lord, thy fervant reares Made of a heart, and cemented with teares Whofe parts are as thy hand did frame; No workmans tool hath touch'd the fame.

A HEART alone

Is fuch a ftone As nothing but

Thy pow'r doth cut, Wherefore each part Of my hard heart Meets in this frame, To praife thy name.

That if I chance to hold my peace, Thefe ftones to praife thee may not ceafe.

O let thy bleffed SACRIFICE be mine, And fanetifie this A L T AR to be thine.

Figure 8. George Herbert, "The Altar," 1633. Reprinted from Higgins 1977 by permission.

cross in pattern poetry, the subject of a recent essay by Ulrich Ernst (1986), are similarly worthy of social analysis, not only for what they reveal in devotional poetry and the impact they occasionally add to it, but also for identifying the faith of the poet, which may help to explain those of his poems that are not pattern poetry (very few poets are known only for their pattern poetry).

Originality One of the chief differences between recent visual poetry and pattern poetry is in their attitudes towards originality. Most twentieth-century visual poets seem to have been attracted to visual poetry, dada, concrete, or some other kind, because they sensed that it had not been done, that it was new, that it was an innovative source of communica- tion, and that its novelty was justified by the new levels of verbal or visual impact that might be achieved through it.8 On the one hand, most of these poets were not very well informed about pattern poetry

8. In some less cosmopolitan literatures, pattern poetry has continued into the twentieth century, especially in cross form, in the sense that it not only is mimetic but seems conscious of its place in a tradition somehow opposed to an avant-garde sensibility.

413




(Gerhard Ruhm is a notable exception); on the other, the stress on innovation often led to an unspoken assumption that each work should be made in a visually unique form.

Pattern poetry, on the other hand, usually has proceeded from another assumption. The poet has not made originality a priority but has worked within the traditions associated with the form he has chosen for a particular piece-cross, wing, syrinx, pyramid, egg, wheel, labyrinth, or another 9-just as, when writing a sonnet, the same poet seldom tries to invent his own type of sonnet, patterning his prosody instead on the Petrarchan or Shakespearean sonnet. Further- more, especially in Germany, where "how to write a poem" works were very popular (Schottel[er] 1656; Harsdorffer 1644-57; Kornfeld 1685; and perhaps a dozen more), the poet who chose pattern poetry as his medium was deliberately allying himself with a tradition, albeit a living one, and, by the eighteenth century, with one which the more innovative poets of the time considered outmoded. It is thus a conser- vative tendency on the part of those later poets to compose pattern poetry, not an innovative or experimental one, as it is with us today. And even the social functions of such poems were associated with convention. For example, one of the typical forms of folkloric pattern poetry in English (and also in Swedish) is the pretzel-like rhyme for- mation (Figure 9; Mennes and Smith 1658: I, 304), called variously the lover's knot, true lover's knot, and the like (see Higgins 1986: 33-35, 46-47; Staff 1970: 28-39). Evidently there was a tradition in Brit- ain and the United States of sending these pieces on Valentine's Day morning. Oliver Goldsmith (1981: 33-34) mentions this tradition at the start of chapter 4 of The Vicar of Wakefield in his description of the idyllic and old-fashioned setting of the vicar's new parish. The custom was already associated by that time with tradition, not with innovation. (Of course, more work has yet to be done on folk traditions of pattern poetry.) Besides lover's knots there are others, such as shaped magical charms.

However, the value of originality to the seventeenth-century mind is hard to estimate. On the one hand, as Elizabeth Cook (1986) points out, Hrabanus Maurus was esteemed partly for his originality.'0 On the other hand, as Wayne Shumaker (1972: 19) has also observed (in reference specifically to Neoplatonism), originality was frequently

9. For example, in India the analogue of pattern poetry is the citra-kavya, which, like the pattern poem, usually is written in any of about 120 traditional bandhas or visual shapes, such as lotuses, swords, flowers, and butter churn handles (which resemble crosses). 10. In Cook 1986: 23-26 also there is an account of reprints of Hrabanus's work and its reception, who knew it, and so on. Chapter 2 of Cook is devoted to pattern poetry.




Figure 9. Anonymous, true lover's knot, 1658.

seen as a vice or flaw: "The imperative in the Renaissance to deny originality was as strong as the desire now to be credited with it." There are numerous instances, especially in German literature, of a

poet including works by another in his own without there having been

any question of plagiarism, even though the borrowed works are not

properly credited to their true author."

11. Enoch Hanmann (seventeenth century) includes several pattern poems of his own in his edition of the works of Martin Opitz (1597-1639); fifteen pattern poems by Johannes Geuder (1640-93) are included in Johannes Praetorius's Satyrus Ety-




An extreme example of casual borrowing is found in the work of the "much maligned" (Cook 1986: 24) Edward Benlowes (1652). His Theophila, or Love's Sacrifice includes, along with some fine rhapsodic verse and some sections that read like filler, a superb pattern poem on the motif of the arma Christi, entitled "Passio Christi" (Figure 10). Copies vary; in some, a set of three crosses is bound in at the very end (Cook 1986: 25). But most appear to include the arma Christi, that is, a set of poetic texts shaped into the objects associated with the Passion: scourge, dice, cross, rooster, and so on. The texts are in fact intexts in Latin, and the piece itself is a carmen cancellatum somewhat in the manner of Hrabanus Maurus. The work was very beautifully engraved in 1632 by Thomas Cecill, who was admired by many of his contemporaries, such as John Evelyn, according to the Dictionary of National Biography.

Now, even if one accepts the sarcastic attack of his near contempo- rary, Samuel Butler (1908: 47-57),12 there is no gainsaying that Ben- lowes was devoted to his art. A friend of the scholar Ralph Winter- ton (ca. 1610-80), an admirer of the pastoral poet William Browne (1591-1643), and the translator Joshua Sylvester (1563-1618), all of whom have earned their own place as pattern poets, Benlowes for about twenty years actually employed his own printer, John Schoren, who grossly betrayed his trust and robbed him. Benlowes supported the publication of Francis Quarles (1592-1644), who wrote four pattern poems as well as his emblem books, and Phineas Fletcher (1582- 1650), among other poets, eventually dying in penury.13 Such a man is not likely to have been guilty of such grossly unethical conduct as deliberate plagiarism.

A German example of literary borrowing from this time is a broadside that appeared in Magdeburg sometime between the end of Wal- lenstein's siege in 1629 and the burning of the city by Tilly in 1631. It

mologicus . . . (1672), a work on witchcraft; Rudolf Karl Geller (seventeenth century) is the author of a cross which appears in a published version of a drama by Johann Klaj(us) (1616-56), Der leidende Christus ... (1645); and many members of the Order of the Flower of the Pegnitz Shepherds, a literary and moral society founded in seventeenth-century Nuremberg which still exists today, among them such poets as Georg Philipp Harsdorffer (1607-58), Johann Helwig (1609-74), and Klaj(us), printed works by each other in their books, usually pseudonymously. 12. Butler's attack on Benlowes's pattern poems suggests, by its centrality, that Benlowes composed more pattern poems than have survived. If he did, the possi- bility is not discussed in Jenkins 1952, the only full-length biography of Benlowes, which says rather little about the pattern poems (but which does, on pages 112-15, give useful information on his admiration of Browne and Sylvester). Only Jenkins says that 1602 was Benlowes's birth year; this date is still controversial. 13. Benlowes's sponsorship of other poets was attacked by later writers who dis- liked pattern poetry, for example, Alexander Pope in The Dunciad: "Benlowes, propitious still to Blockheads, bows" (3.21). Today, of course, the question of Ben- lowes's taste has been reopened.




Figure 10. Edward Benlowes (?), "Passio Christi," 1652. Reprinted by permission of Chapin Library, Williams College.

bears an arma Christi poem, "Figurata Meditatio Passionis Christi" (Figure 11), composed by "Samuele Pomario" (see Ernst 1985: 77). That the poem was published by Balthasar Caymox as some kind of memorial does not seem improbable. But a woodcut version of the

very same poem is included in a manuscript at the Herzog-August- Bibliothek in Wolfenbiittel, "Cod. Guelf. Aug. 38.25," folio 84,'4 which includes no pieces more recent than 1590. Thus the author of the piece

14. For this information we are indebted to Professor Dr. Ulrich Ernst of the Bergische Universitat, Wuppertal.

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is not the celebrated theologian Samuel Pomarius, who was in any case a child in 1630, but it could be the Samuel Pomarius who is known to have been the parson of St. Gertrauden's Church in Magdeburg, and who may have been the brother of Johann Pomarius (d. 1578), with whom a Samuel Pomarius wrote a verse chronicle of the city. (A set of illustrated devotional verses by a Samuel Pomarius, dated 1581, is also extant, and, though we do not know for sure, this may have been the same poet.)

The facts are clear: The Pomarius version of the arma Christi is known to have existed before 1590, while the version found in many




copies of Benlowes's work was not engraved by Cecill until 1632. We also know that from the summer of 1627 until late 1630 Benlowes traveled on the continent, attending lectures at universities, and also that he was born a Roman Catholic and remained one until his con- version to Anglicanism in 1632. This accords with his use of an arma Christi. Note also that the Benlowes version is not specifically credited to Benlowes. Might it have been a piece which Benlowes received from the continent? Since he was a connoisseur and the piece is a fine example of its sort,15 might he not have commissioned Cecill to engrave it in England? Why is the piece in some but not all copies of Theophila? Might it not be the case that Benlowes never claimed the piece as his own, but that he wished to use it in his work and that the question of its authorship was unimportant enough to him that he neglected to give the author due credit? Might he not have left it out of some copies of Theophila because it was not his own work, and because of its possible associations with Roman Catholicism?

This may be overly charitable to Benlowes, but it also may be the best explanation. Thus far we have only a hypothesis, an unproven theory. What our evidence shows most clearly is that originality was not considered of primary importance at the time. In any case, this instance of plagiarism or unacknowledged borrowing would probably not have been noticed if it had not been for the current international interest in pattern poetry, which has resulted in the examination and reevaluation of a large amount of material.

Recent Visual Poetry versus Pattern Poetry A few remarks seem called for with regard to pattern poetry and the visual poetries of our own century. Is there any great difference among these? Not really. Attempts have been made to distinguish these poetries-which I will with great hesitance call "modern"-from pattern poetry on the grounds that the pattern poems are more typically mimetic. But are they? It is true that our examples in this small selection do not reflect geometrical forms or inventions or abstract processes, but if the reader will turn to Higgins 1987, which has about 170 illustrations, we see that there is no shortage of abstract visual construc- tions, including those which, like the Darmstadt school example of Williams (Figure 6), derives the logic of its visual shape purely from the meaning of its words. Nikolaus Petersen's seventeenth-century Danish piece there is of this sort. There are also some similarities between other Williams pieces and the one by Daniel Klesel (Figure 5).

15. Cf. the set by Guido Casoni (1975 [1626]), the full version of which first appeared in the twelfth edition of Casoni; its language is weak and its visual forms crude, though Casoni was one of the most popular poets of his time.




However, it was strategically inopportune, particularly for the earli- est moderns such as Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), to claim any great affinity with the earlier pieces; and in this respect the modern pieces are different from older ones, being consciously dissociated from their traditions (see, e.g., Ernst 1982, 1986). The moderns had to claim greater originality for themselves than was warranted in order to allow their formal novelties to be accepted at all.16 The pattern poets wished to do quite the opposite, to pretend to less originality than was, in fact, the case, both to strengthen the evocativeness of their work and to create a sense of auctoritas behind it. A poem takes part of its

strength from the other poems one can feel behind it, from its literary evocativeness. Only at great peril does a poet destroy this allusiveness in order to fill out the image of the "totally new" poem. After all, when a totally new poem is no longer totally new, on what can it then

depend to replace its novelty? Its language? The assumed historical sense of the reader? This question would have been apparent to many of the pattern poets if not to our contemporaries, with their eagerness to belong to an avant-garde or their concern that what they do must achieve some sort of formal novelty.

Secondly, only about two thousand pattern poems are known; the

catalog of the Sackner Archive lists at least twenty thousand visual

poems of one kind or another from this century alone (see Sackner and Sackner 1986). Where there are perhaps a dozen or so historical

groupings in pattern poetry apart from nationality, or perhaps three dozen by genre and subgenre, in the modern materials there are at least eleven or twelve historical divisions which, if a large critical historical work were ever done on twentieth-century visual poetry, would each need chapters: futurism, Apollinaire and the Parisians (such as Pierre Albert-Birot, 1876-1967), East European cubofuturism, dada- ism in its various forms,17 De Stijl and Bauhaus typographic experi-

16. The only comment of which we are aware on the part of an early-modern visual

poet is Apollinaire's, documented in Bohn 1986: 46-48, where one Felicien Fagus, referring to Rabelais and Panard in the pages of Paris-Midi (July 22, 1914), wrote, "I have indeed returned to basic principles since the ideogram is the fundamental

principle of writing. However, the difference between my poems and the examples he cites is like that between a toy automobile of the sixteenth century, powered by clockwork springs, and a modern racing car. The solitary shapes by Rabelais and Panard lack expressiveness, like the other typographical drawings, whereas the relations between the juxtaposed figures in one of my poems are as expressive as the words that compose it. And this at least, I think, is a new invention." 17. The most convenient recent publication on early-modern visual literature is

that edited by Dachy (1985). Dachy's selection, drawing on very rare material, is both unusual and pertinent; the colored illustrations are in the form of 35 mm slides. Another useful recent collection about the early moderns is Hulten 1986.



Higgins ? Pattern Poetry as Paradigm 421

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Higgins ? Pattern Poetry as Paradigm 423

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Figure 14. Wladistaw Strzeminski (1893-1952), cover to book of poems by Julian Przybos. Reprinted by permission of Marc Dachy.

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Figure 15. Ernst Buchwalder (1941- ), "poetree," 1971. Reprinted by permission of Art contemporain.




ments, post-World War II lettrism, 18 concrete poetry (this large and cumbersome classification should perhaps be broken up),19 and poesia visiva or postconcrete styles.20 Some of these materials are more famil- iar than others. In recent years the dadaist pieces have been reprinted endlessly, whereas others have received less than their due from literary scholars. The cubofuturists have been widely written about by art historians and Slavicists, but less so by comparative literature scholars. Our Figures 12-14 (see Dachy 1984) are chosen to show what a variety of materials is available here. We have also shown an example of a concrete poem by Emmett Williams (Figure 6) and now show one of poesia visiva by the Swiss artist Ernst Buchwalder (Figure 15; see Kempton and Higgins 1984). Thus there are statistical problems involved with the modern pieces; they are common and accessible, but the historical process of filtering out the best and of establishing the appropriate criteria has not yet proceeded very far. Nor, one might add, should the process have proceeded too far yet, with regard to the most recent materials, since for it to have done so might have led to a judgmental and historicistic atmosphere in which any kind of artistic innovation, any new style or statement, was stifled without being given the benefit of the doubt, which such innovations need in order to be nurtured.

For this reason, it will take a long time to sort out the modern materials, to classify them without putting them prescriptively into the straitjacket of the "model" visual poem. Hence my reluctance to show more than a few examples of what such pieces can be in Figures 6 and 15. Dozens of others would serve as well. But in dealing with these most recent areas, one invades the land of the artist and his observers. As a practicing artist, I prefer to leave this invasion to others and to confine my own observations to areas which, though unfamiliar, are older and not likely to conflict with my own work.

18. There is as yet no large scholarly work in English on the lettrists, though there is a fine small work edited by Curtay (1985), published also as a special issue of Visible Language. The visual poetry from the 1930s and 1940s in the United States by Bern Porter and others, which appeared in Circle and other magazines, has no particular title and is poorly documented. 19. The literature of concrete poetry is vast in published work but surprisingly small, on the whole, in criticism. In the United States, the two most important anthologies are those by Williams (1968) and Solt (1968). There is a great deal of criticism of concrete poetry in German distinguishing it from other visual poetries, for example, two issues of Text + Kritik, 25 (1970) and 40 (1975), and Hartung 1975, to which there is nothing comparable in English. The best we have is Richard Kostelanetz's (1979) far more miscellaneous "Visual Lit Crit." 20. Two typical recent publications of poesia visiva are Dencker 1984 and Kemp- ton and Higgins 1984. Other useful, current periodicals which publish many works of poesia visiva are Doc(k)s (France), Lotta poetica (Italy), and Kontexts (Canada).




References Angot, Robert

1977 [1872] "Sieur de l'eporoniere," in Higgins 1977.

August, duke of Liineburg-Braunschweig, II [Gustavus Selenus, pseud.] 1624 Cryptomenytices et Cryptographiae ... Libri 9 (Liineburg: Johann et Henricus

der Sternen). Benlowes, Edward

1652 Theophila, or Love's Sacrifice (London: Henry Seile and Humphrey Mosely). Bohn, Willard

1986 The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry: 1914-1928 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press). Butler, Samuel

1970 "A Small Poet," in Characters, edited by Charles W. Davis, 89-90 (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve).

Casoni, Guido 1975 [1626] in Rak 1975: 159-61.

Cook, Elizabeth 1986 Seeing through Words: The Scope of Late Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, CT:

Yale University Press). Crespin, Jehan [Jean]

1569 [Poetae Graeci] Vestustissimi Authorum Georgica, Bucolica et Gnomica Poemata

quae Supersunt (Geneva: E. Vignon). Curtay, Jean-Paul

1985 Lettrism (Iowa City: Art Museum, University of Iowa). Dachy, Marc

1985 Avant-gardes et nouvelle typographie au debut du siecle (Paris: Centre National de Documentation Pedagogique).

Dencker, Klaus Peter, ed. 1984 Visuelle Poesie (Saarbrucken: Saarlandischen Rundfunk).

Ernst, Ulrich 1982 "Europaische Figurengedichte in Pyramidenform aus dem 16. und 17.

Jahrhundert," Euphorion 76: 295-360. 1985 "Lesen als Rezeptionsakt in der manieristichen Barocklyrik," in Lesen-

Historisch, edited by Brigitte Schlieben-Lange, 67-84 (Gottingen: Vanden- hoeck und Ruprecht).

1986 "Die neuzeitliche Rezeption des mittelalterlichen Figurengedichtes in Kreuzform: Praliminarien zur Geschichte eines textgraphischen Modells," in Mittelalter-Rezeption: Ein Symposion, edited by Peter Wapnewski, 187-233

(Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung). Goldsmith, Oliver

1981 The Vicar of Wakefield (Darby, PA: Arden). Gow, A. S. F.

1958 The Greek Bucolic Poets (Oxford: Clarendon). Harsdorffer, Georg Philipp

1644-57 Frauenzimmer Gesprechspiele, 8 vols. (Nuremberg: Wolfgang Endtern). Hartung, Harald

1975 Experimentelle Literatur und konkrete Poesie (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und

Ruprecht). Hatherly, Ana

1983 A Experiencia do Prodigio: Bases te6ricas e antologia de textos-visuais portugueses dos seculos 17 e 18 (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-Casa de Moeda).




Herbert, George 1977a [1633] "The Altar," in Higgins 1977. 1977b [1633] "Easter Wings," in Higgins 1977.

Higgins, Dick 1977 George Herbert's Pattern Poems: In Their Tradition (West Glover, VT: Printed

Editions). 1987 Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature (Albany: State University of

New York Press). Higgins, Dick, ed.

1986 Visible Language 20(1) [pattern poetry issue]. Hollander, John

1975 Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Form (New York: Oxford University Press).

Hulten, Pontus 1986 Futurismo efuturismi/Futurism and Futurisms (New York: Abbeville Press).

Jenkins, Harold 1952 Edward Benlowes (1602-1676): Biography of a Minor Poet (Cambridge: Har-

vard University Press). Kempton, Karl, and Dick Higgins, eds.

1984 Art contemporain 5 [visual poetry issue]. Kern, Hermann

1982 Labyrinthe, 2d ed. (Munich: Prestel). Kornfeld, Theodor

1685 Selbst-lehrende alt-neue Poesie ... (Bremen: Hermann Brauer). Kostelanetz, Richard, ed.

1979 Vis Lit Crit (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press). Liceti, Fortunio

1640 Ad alas amoris divini a Simmia Rhodio compactus (Padua: Iulius Crivellarius). Massin, Robert

1970 Letter and Image (London: Studio Vista). Maurus, Hrabanus

1970 Liber de Laudibus Sanctae Crucis (Graz: Akademischer Druck). Mennes, John, and James Smith, eds.

1874 [1658] Facetiae. Musarum Delicae: or, The Muses' Recreation, 2 vols. (London: John Camden Hotton).

Newell, Kenneth B. 1976 Pattern Poems: A Historical Critique (Boston: Marlborough House).

Petersen, Nikolaus 1679 Danckschuldige Ehrengedichtniss demJohannes Birckenbusch (Gluckstadt: Mel-

chior Kochen). Pozzi, Giovanni

1981 La Parola Dipinta (Milan: Adelphi). Praz, Mario

1964 Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery, 2d ed. (Rome: Edizioni de Storia e Letteraria).

Rak, Michele 1975 La Maschera della Fortuna. Lettere del Basile "Toscano" (Naples: Liguori).

Rypson, Piotr 1986 "The Labyrinth Poem," in Higgins 1986: 65-95.

Sackner, Ruth, and Marvin Sackner 1986 The Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, 1984

(Miami Beach, FL: Sackner Archive).




Schottel[er], Georg 1656 Teutsche Vers oder Reimkunst (Frankfurt am Main: Verlegung Michael Cu-

bachs Buch). Shumaker, Wayne

1972 The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance: A Study in Intellectual Patterns (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press).

Simias of Rhodes 1516 "Wings," in Theocritus 1516.

Solt, Mary Ellen 1968 Concrete Poetry: A World View (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).

Speed, Samuel 1677 Prison Pietie, or Meditations Divine and Moral (London: printed by "J. C." for

S. S.). Staff, Frank

1970 The Valentine and Its Origins (New York: Praeger). Stevenson, Matthew

1986 [1654] "To My Honored Friend," in Higgins 1986: 38. Sutor (Schuster), Andreas

1740 Der Hundert Augige Blinde Argos (Augsburg: Rieger). Theocritus

1516 Eidulon (Rome). Williams, Emmett

1968 [1958] "like attracts like," in An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, edited by Emmett Williams (New York: Something Else Press).

1975 Selected Shorter Poems, 1950-1970 (New York: New Directions).



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