Willes , as he had invented that form . In English hands technopaegnia had , I have argued , always willingly mixed the older ‘ shaped poem ’ tradition with theoretical deviations on either side — on one , the calligraphic picture-poem , and on the other , the verbal tricks of the Ausonian tradition . But as time went on the verbal strain came to predominate in English technopaegnia , and the visual fireworks concocted by Wykehamists in the last years of Elizabeth and the first of James were replaced by more rectilinear exercises in textual ingenuity .
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Most Wykehamists went on to Oxford and almost all of these went to Wykeham ’ s parallel foundation , New College . Oxford and Cambridge , at both collegiate and university level , also indulged in collections of poems to mark significant events , but these were more typically printed , because the institutional scale was larger , and because there were local presses to hand . Systematic examination of the dozen and a half Oxford volumes from the New College 1587 Peplus on the death of Philip Sidney up to the university Parentalia on the death of James in 1625 confirms the decline in shaped poetry , never especially prominent in university writing , and so far untraced in corresponding Cambridge collections . The Peplus opens with a fine Greek ‘ Altar ’ written by its editor John Luid , a notably learned Wykehamist , but thereafter across many hundreds of poems the number of strictly figured poems reaches only around a dozen . Conversely chronograms , anagrams , acrostics , and the like remain rife . An isolated figured example from as late as 1662 , consisting of a fourteen-pointed star containing a Homeric cento along its interlaced sides , is a lone and unrepeated exception . 19
After Willes , shaped poetry made inroads in the vernacular too , but it peaked later than in the Neo-Latin or -Greek tradition . A well-known but somewhat confusing chapter in George Puttenham ’ s 1589 Arte of English Poesie detailed all the geometric shapes in which a poem might be written , even claiming that this was the traditional Chinese way of composing poetry . Thereafter we find various shapes cropping up in English-language collections , culminating in Mildmay Fane ’ s extraordinary Otia Sacra of 1648 . This volume is full of visual conceits so complex and indeed so close to emblems that many of necessity are engraved or printed from woodcuts . It is no
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