embraced acrostics , palindromes , various grammatical and metrical virtuosities , riddles , an inverted pyramid ( this from a French example ), echo poems , a ‘ pentalpha ’, some ‘ hieroglyphs ’, intexts in the manner of Optatian , technopaegnia in the strictest sense of poems imitating Ausonius , ‘ serpentine ’ poems which form perpetual loops , even rhyming Latin , and macaronic or polyglot poems . All this was designed to set English poetry ( not the same as ‘ poetry in English ’), on the international stage : as Willes says in his preface , he is competing with the French , Germans , and Italians .
Willes had some obvious masters . One we have encountered , namely the elder Scaliger , whose edition of Theocritus and treatise on poetry provided Willes with both practical and theoretical material to copy . Another is the Italian Pierio Valeriano ( 1477 – 1558 ), a man whose first name sounds a bit like ‘ pear ’ ( Latin pirum ), and who accordingly wrote a poem in pearform , which Willes imitated . He also wrote a ‘ Dactylic Egg ’, subtitled ‘ θεοκριτικῶς ’, a coined Greek adverb meaning ‘ after Theocritus ’. 12 Now Willes used exactly the same subtitle for his altar-poem , and then titled his Scaligerian ‘ Little Egg ’ ‘ Σιμμιακῶς ’ ( i . e . ‘ after Simmias ’). Finally , Valerianus ’ s well-known obsession with Egyptian hieroglyphs is the source of Willes ’ s own arrestingly odd hieroglyphical ‘ poem ’— a series of woodcut animals following one another across the page . There were also several other continental poets in whose volumes Willes might have found the old Hellenistic examples revived in Latin , and there is no doubt that whatever Willes ’ s Winchester experiences , his immediate inspiration was continental , and indeed rather Roman Catholic . 13
Willes ’ s technical exuberance soon influenced his young ( Protestant ) dedicatees , but this has remained unnoticed for two reasons . The first is social . Wykehamists tended to write short , occasional poems , often inspired by , and tied to , specific incidents , for a limited circulation . This is ‘ coterie ’ poetry , operating at the level of a closed community , and such poetry favoured manuscript over print for reasons of exclusivity and practicality . The second is technological . Even had the school wished to print its little collections of occasional verse , the challenges to typesetting posed by non-linear technopaegnia were considerable . A printer would have had to resort to the expedients of woodcuts or engravings , and these were expensive .
We have to turn therefore to manuscripts , and it must be stressed at once that most of the examples in this collection survive by the thinnest
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