known also as “shaped poetry” (Gr. technopaigneia, Lat. carmina ƒigurata), is premodern verse in which the letters, words, or lines are arrayed visually to form recognizable shapes, usually the shapes of natural objects. While the origins of in the West are unknown (a Cretan piece dating from ca. 1700 B.C. and some Egyptian pieces dating from 700 B.C. are not certain), there are six surviving p. poems by Gr. Bucolic poets, shaped as an axe, an egg, wings, two altars, and a syrinx. In late Cl. Lat. there is a panegyric cycle by P. Optatianus Porfyrius praising the Emperor Constantine the Great, whose court poet Optatian was. These poems are for the most part rectilinear or square, with “intexts” woven into or canceled out from the main text (hence their names carmina quadrata and carmina cancellata). This subgenre, revived at the Merovingian court by Fortunatus, was also popular in the Carolingian Ren. (Boniface, Alcuin, Josephus Scotus) and was the dominant form of the subgenre through the Middle Ages and into the 12th c., when the popularity of p. p. waned. Extant intexts are shaped as a galley with oars (Optatian) and a crucified Christ about 70 late Cl. and Med. pieces are known.
A second and larger wave of began in the 16th c., initially written mainly in Lat. and Gr. by learned poets in imitation of the pieces in the Greek Anthology, but, later, in virtually all the langs. of Europe and in Hebrew as well, in such new shapes as suns, circles, pyramids, and columns, and in dozens of less common and unique shapes. By the had become associated, for the most part, with occasional verse and was used to celebrate such occasions as births, marriages, ordinations, and funerals, though in Eng. such major poets as George Herbert (1593-1633) and Robert Herrick (1591-1674) wrote serious Herbert’s “The Altar” and “Easter wings” are the best-known examples in the lang. While from this period nearly 2000 pieces are known, a reaction against p. p. set in with the spread of neoclassical poetics (q.v.) in the late 17th c It is difficult for a modern reader to understand the vehemence of the caustic comments heaped on in the 18th and early by Addison in Spectator no. 58. When was accepted at all, it was taken as suitable only for comic verse, “The Tale of the Mouse” in Alice in Wonderland.
But late in the 19th c., serious poets turned once more to visual poetry (q.v.), as in Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Un coup de dés” and Apollinaire’s Calligrammes (q.v.); and thousands of modern works have been composed in its several subgenres. However, modern visual poems are usually associated with avant-garde movements and assume some degree of originality, unlike p. p., which is usually mimetic and less abstract in shape than other modern forms of visual poetry such as concrete poetry (q.v.). Further, the shapes of p. p. often have their accrued traditions which the reader in older times would have known but which modern scholars are only now rediscovering (Ernst). Still, some modern poets, such as Dylan Thomas and John Hollander, have successfully experimented with p. p.
Close analogues to exist in many non-Western poetries, such as hüi-wen in Chinese (from the late Han, 2d c. A.D. , up to modern times), ashide-e in Japanese (esp. in the early Tokugawa, 16th c.), and citra-kävyas in Sanskrit (from the 7th c. A.D. onward) and other langs. of the Indian subcontinent. These latter are particularly interesting since, like Western p. poems, they are composed in traditional shapes and classified by these into bandhas, with each bandha having its own associations and traditions.
User Comments Add a comment…