Latin defence of poetry , the earliest of its kind in England , a complete set of scholia on Willes ’ s own poems , and finally a verse life of the Founder and couplets on every warden and headmaster written by Willes ’ s own teacher , Johnson . Willes , who had some explaining to do upon his return from the continent , prudently dedicated his poetry to William Cecil , Lord Burghley , but the rest of his book , complete with a woodcut of Wykeham ’ s arms , was offered to the ‘ Warden , Fellows , and Boys of Wykeham ’ s College at Winton ’. We shall return to this landmark manifesto for learned poetry .
Literary historians have long been aware of the debt of Herbert to Willes . 2 But none of the many studies of pattern poetry ( carmina figurata , ‘ shaped poetry ’, or technopaegnia , ‘ art-play ’, to give the genre two of its more technical names ), has noticed a crucial fact in its literary history , namely that Willes ’ s poetic manifesto was indeed heeded by the ‘ Boys of Wykeham ’ s College at Winton ’. For Winchester became the major centre for the production of pattern poetry in the period , and Willes and his Wykehamist heirs are the subjects of this anthology .
*
What is a pattern poem ? We lack any stable term from antiquity : carmen figuratum was a term applied to early Christian examples of grid-poems , in which an ‘ intext ’ or hidden poem is drawn out of a background poem by its pattern ; and technopaignion , despite its Greek ring , is only as old as the late Latin poet Ausonius , who coined the term to describe certain verbal rather than visual tricks — acrostics , for instance , or poems in which every line ends with a monosyllabic word . Indeed , it is helpful to think of pattern poems as operating in one or more of a number of theoretically distinct categories , for we shall see that the Wykehamist pattern poets , following Willes , exploited several available traditions . 3
The first and most ancient tradition is formed by the Hellenistic group of figured poems mentioned above . Modern classicists might assume that these came down to Willes and his age in the collection known as the Greek Anthology , but the version of that collection circulating in the period , the ‘ Planudean Anthology ’, lacked these poems , which were only realised to belong to the Anthology upon the rediscovery in late 1606 of the older version known as the ‘ Palatine Anthology ’. 4 Before then we must seek
3