coincidence that Fane , Earl of Westmorland , possessed the means to fund such a venture , and that this volume was privately published and circulated .
Herbert ’ s figured poems remain the most visible and arguably the best of this ephemeral genre . But what this introduction has demonstrated is that the tradition , rooted in Greek pagan but also in Christian Latin poetry and calligraphy , had a recrudescence in the sixteenth century , where it passed from the continent to England with the return of a young Wykehamist who had already picked up a taste for poetry while at school . In the late sixteenth century the Cambridge don Gabriel Harvey , himself a champion of reintroducing Latin metres to English verse , wrote a harsh and slightly muddled critique of what he called the ‘ ridiculous and madd gugawes and crockchettes ’ of figured verse . He blamed it on Willes , who in ‘ riper yeares ’, so Harvey claimed , disowned his youthful poems as ‘ friuolous boyishe grammer schole trickes .’ 20 Willes ’ s immediate influences , as Harvey well knew , were not at all ‘ boys ’, but prominent continental literati . Harvey ’ s exact wording in fact suggests something we had until now forgotten . For in England such poetry was for a time precisely a ‘ grammer schole ’ tradition , and indeed specifically a Wykehamist one .
William Poole New College / Winchester College 2020
Notes
1 . For Willes see primarily Leicester Bradner , Musae Anglicanae : A History of Anglo-Latin Poetry , 1500 – 1925 ( New York , 1940 ), pp . 34 – 5 ; J . W . H . Atkins , English Literary Criticism : The Renascence ( London , 1947 ), pp . 103 – 11 ; A . D . S . Fowler , introduction to Wills [ sic ], De re poetica ( Oxford , 1957 ); Ulrich Ernst , ‘ Neulateinisches Figurengedicht und manieristische Poetik . Zum ‘ Poematum Liber ’ ( 1573 ) des Richard Willis ’ in Wolfgang Braungart , ed ., Manier und Manierismus ( Tübingen , 2000 ); and Anthony Payne ’ s article in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography .
2 . Margaret Church , ‘ The First English Pattern Poems ’, PMLA 61 ( 1946 ), 636 – 50 ; Bart Westerweel , Patterns and Patterning : A Study of Four Poems by George Herbert ( Amsterdam , 1984 ).
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