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The First English Pattern Poems
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Pattern poetry is verse which by the varying length of its lines forms a picture or design. Although most readers have noticed Herbert's “Easter Wings” or some of the fanciful shapes in Carolyn Wells' Whimsey Anthology, few have realized that these verses are forms which have come down to the modern era from Greek literature and possibly from even earlier oriental writings. My purpose in this article is to bring to light still one more influence which the Greek Anthology exerted on English literature in the sixteenth century and to discuss the first English poets who began to write shaped verses, forerunners of hundreds of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century patterns in poetry.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1946
References
1 Anthony à. Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, ed. P. Bliss (London, 1813), i, 9.
2 Convercyon of Swerers (1530?), sig. B4v.
3 Convercyon (1530?), sig. A3v.
4 The Poems of George Daniel, Esq., ed. A. B. Grosart (Printed for Private Circulation, 1878), Vols. i, ii.
5 Anthologia Graeca ad Palatini codicis fidem edita (Leipzig: Metzger & Wittig, 1872), iii, 209-221.
6 Jean Crispin, Poetae Graeci vestustissimi (Geneva, 1600), 214-223.
7 The altar included in sixteenth-century editions of the Greek Anthology is the altar of Dosiados. The second altar by Vestinus was not printed until 1619.
8 Crispin, 224.
9 Biographie universelle (Paris: Michaud Frères, 1813), x, 243-244.
10 
, with emendations by Joseph Scaliger, Isaac Casaubon, Daniel Heinsius (Heidelberg, 1603), sig. V-V8.
11 Samuel Sheppard, Epigrams Six Bookes Also the Socratick Session or The Araignment of Julius Scaliger with some Select Poems (London, 1651), 185.
12 John Collop, Poesis rediviva (London, 1656), 64.
13 Ibid., 65.
14 Scribleriad, Book i, p. 22.
15 xlvii, 317-318.
16 Amorum libri (1549). Poem in which Sabellicus suggests the change from Pierre to Pierius.
17 Joannes Pierius Valerianus, Poemata (Basel, 1538). Colophon: in officina R. Winter.
18 xlvii, 318.
19 Joannes Pierius Valerianus, Hieroglyphica, sive de sacris Aegyptiorum, aliarumque gentium literis (Lyons: Bartholomew Honoraty, 1579), 464.
20 Ibid., 382-384.
21 Ibid., 419. Cf. Edward Benlowes, Theophila, or Loves Sacrifice a Divine Poem (London, 1652), colophon.
22 Francis Quarles, “Hieroglyphics of the Life of Man,” in Emblemes (London, 1639).
23 Abraham Fraunce, Insignium, amorum, emblematum, hieroglyphicorum et symbolorum explicatio (1588).
24 Gabriel Harvey, Letter-Book (1573-1580), ed. E. J. L. Scott (Westminster, 1884) 100-101.
25 Poematum liber, sig. C2v.
26 The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), 26.
27 Poematum liber, sig. C2.
28 William R. Alger, The Poetry of the East (Boston: Whittemore, Niles and Hall, 1856), 5-6.
29 Poematum liber, sig. C2.
30 Poematum liber, sig. C2.
31 Ibid., sig. B2.
32 
(Heidelberg, 1603).
33 Sig. V2; sig. V2v; sig. V2v; Emend. B2v.
34 
, sig. V6v.
35 Sig. V1.
36 Sig. B7.
37 Elsa Kluge, P. Optatiani Porfyrii carmina (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1926), No. xxvii.
38 J. Crispin, Poetae Graeci, 214.
39 Ibid., 213.
“Hoc Eidyll ita carmina reddidit Eobarus Heffus Fistula es, ipsa tibi inspirat sapientia melos.
Neminis ô coniux longi genitrix Ptolemai,
Nutricis 
hosti patris genuisti actore.“ etc.
hosti patris genuisti actore.“ etc.40 Poematum liber, sig. C2v.
41 Monumenta Germaniae historica, poetae Latini, ed. E. Duemmler (Berlin, 1881), iv, 412 ff.
42 Giorlamo Musici, Rime diversi (Padua, Lorenzo Pasquati, 1570).
43 “Bonifacio's Musarum libri xxv (Venice, 1628) is wholly made up of figure-poems—poems in the shape of wheels, wings, altars, etc.” J. Hutton, The Greek Anthology in Italy to 1800 (Ithaca, New York, 1935), 77.
44 Dedicated to Bridget, Countess of Bedford, 1577.
45 B. M. Ward, “The Authorship of the Arte of English Poesie: A Suggestion,” Review of English Studies, i, no. 3 (1925), 284 ff.
46 George Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, ed. Edward Arber (London: A Constable and Co. Ltd., 1906), 1-13.
47 George Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, ed. G. D. Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: University Press, 1936), i-xcix.
48 Willcock and Walker, 111-112.
49 Ibid., 91.
50 La Rue Van Hook, “Greek Rhetorical Terminology in Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie,” Transactions of the American Philological Association, xlv (1914), 115 ff.
51 Egg.
52 Pyramid reversed and egg.
53 Willcock and Walker, 91.
54 Arber, 264.
55 Ibid., 212.
56 Edward G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1906), ii, 46.
57 The pillar of Puttenham has been reprinted by J. Nichols in his Progresses of Queen Elizabeth (1823), iii, 51. E. K. Chambers in his Sir Henry Lee (Oxford, 1936) reprints the pillars from Nichols.
58 Willcock and Walker, 101.
59 Ibid., 91.
60 Ibid., 101.
61 Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Bucolici Graeci (Oxford, 1905), 145.
62 Willcock and Walker, lvii.