Pattern Poetry as Paradigm

Abstract

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 Englisha 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-