revised version of his father ’ s edition of Theocritus ( 1596 ). We can extract a third category from Optatian , for he also experimented with more strictly verbal tricks , such as poems which increase in syllable count each line , or poems which contain lines displaying all cases or all parts of speech . This is very similar to Ausonian technopaegnia , and is the fount of all sorts of early modern varieties of formally self-limiting verse .
The final tradition is harder to pin down in terms of origins . This is when the line itself is no longer straight , but may be curved or bent to form shapes directly . Parallels are often drawn with Jewish or Islamic calligraphy , in which illustrations are ‘ pixelated ’ with sacred text . This is a form of calligraphy also known as ‘ micrography ’, and there are classical parallels , such as the old anecdote of all of Homer ’ s Iliad written on a piece of parchment enclosed in a nutshell . 8 A hint of the potentialities of bending lines was available through Simmias ’ s ‘ Axe ’, where the lines forming the blades were artfully curved by the typesetters of most sixteenth-century editions . However , the realisation that one can ‘ draw ’ with lines of poetry was , as we shall see , taken to extremes by a handful of Wykehamist poets .
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Winchester College had long had a tradition of writing epigram , and a taste for figured poetry may have arisen from the school ’ s obsession with epigrams . We do not know the full extent of Christopher Johnson ’ s famed poetic instruction , but it is notable that the ‘ Dictates ’ of Johnson ’ s pupil and eventual successor John Harmar , c . 1590 , contain an ‘ hourglass ’ poem in Latin , in thirty lines diminishing and increasing again symmetrically . 9 Willes also recalled Johnson schooling him in poetry . 10 We cannot rule out the possibility that shaped poetry was appreciated and perhaps even constructed in Winchester College before Willes left his old school .
Nevertheless , Willes was the proximate cause for the explosion of interest in what I shall now call technopaegnia , understood to mean all the forms of ‘ art-play ’ surveyed above . His one hundred numbered poems comprise a collection designed to display the range of formal ingenuity available to the modern poet . For him , all poetry was artificial , and all verse forms somewhere on a spectrum of art-play . 11 In addition to the traditional Hellenistic forms of pipe , wings , altar , axe , and egg , Willes ’ s century
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