"Technopaigneia, Carmina Figurata, and Bilder-Reime" by Jeremy Adler

CITATION: Adler, Jeremy. "Technopaigneia, Carmina Figurata, and Bilder-Reime: Seventeenth-Century Figured Poetry in a Historical Perspective." Comparative Criticism 4 (1993): 107-48. Web. 25 Feb. 2013.
Understanding

• Question: How did Renaissance and early modern Europeans understand figured poetry?
• Answer: Renaissance European poets recovered the classical tradition of figure poetry, though they added to this the effects of metrical correspondence and appropriate subject matter. These additions suggest a belief in the correspondence between forms and meaning, and the pursuant possibility of religious articulation.
• Method: Adler divides several forms of figure poetry according to terminology, and accordingly, by language and culture. Consequently, Adler observes the different formal possibilities emended by different cultures to figure poetry, and therefore, theories of meaning.
• Technopaigneia: "poems written in lines of varying length which follow the outline of an object." (118)
• Carmina figurata: "the use of pictorial additions, after the manner of Hrabanus Maurus." (120-1)
• Gesamtkunstwerk: "poems [that] combine verse, music, and typography." (122)
• Bilder-Reime: "depend primarily on the normal devices of the (printed) language, which exists at one remove of the object, yet partakes in its nature. They require no pictorial adornment (but do not preclude it), since the necessary visual quality can be found in language itself." (129)
• Assumptions: Adler takes up Foucault rather naively, and thereby Adler seems to attribute a peculiar theory of language--so-called the "Book of Nature"--to the early moderns. 
• Sententiae:
• "As Wiliamowitz Moellendorff observed, the form of the poems does not emerge fully from the texts: they require calligraphic adjustment... Although the texts followed iconic principles to establish a general shape, iconicity was not their sole purpose. It provided a framework, not a grid, and departures for linguistic or metrical reasons were adjusted graphically. This gives a tripartite scheme of composition, which was re-adopted in the Renaissance: (1) iconic form; (2) linguistic formulation; (3) graphic execution. These three vehicles of meaning are interdependent. Interdependence does not, however, mean equality, and in the technopaigneia, language is central... For if the technopaigneia were so inscribed, the shape was secondary: the earliest texts were not autonomous picture-poems." (109)
• "Apart from their shape, these poems have a second, and quite distinct, visual quality: the peculiar arrangement of their lines. Three of them discard sequential linearity and invite a playful, yet also concentrated, manner of reading... The playfulness of this device is particularly evidenct in the 'Egg,' where the dexterity involved in handling the egg to discover its meaning is part of the fun." (110)
• "The form [of patterned poetry] was as inimical to the ethic of taste as it was irrelevant to the following ethos of Romanticism, and it is only very recently that writers have approached it with critical understanding... Sacrificing accuracy to effect, [Addison] (perhaps unwittingly) exaggerated the importance of the 'Procrustian' shape in the Greek technopaigneia, ignoring the fact that they follow metrical principles to create an outline which is only finalized calligraphically." (116)
• "Poets had become attuned to spatial methods of composition. Poetologically, however, figured poetry could be understood to develop the doctrine of ut pictura poesis... Generically, [figure poems] belonged with forms such as anagram and the number-poem as a playful kind, but also with the emblem. In emblematic terms, the figured poem conflates pictura  and subscriptio into a single word-image, thereby to become a kind of telescoped emblem, a modern equivalent of the hieroglyph. Finally, therefore, patterned poetry assumes an intellectual role comparable to that of the hieroglyph, by reflecting the universal and ideal 'language' of the 'Book of Nature' (Cook, 'Figured Poetry'). Underlying this metaphor of the 'book' is a set of ontological assumptions, apparent in the theory of language itself... On this view, language is not just a set of intelligible (human) signs, but is affined to Nature and partakes in the character of natural realities like stones or plants." (128)
• "The typography of the earliest editions [of "Easter Wings"] is worth attention in so visual a poem. In these, the stanzas appear vertically on facing pages, recalling the normal printing of Simias' 'Wings' and the wings of angels. But Herbert introduces two pairs of wings where Simias has one; this recalls the Renaissance printings of the technopaigneia in parallel Greek and Latin texts, which stimulated imitations in the late sixteenth century. Such parallel texts probably provided Herbert's iconographical source, and this may have a bearing on his poem." (139)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Adler's methodology seems a bit naive, especially considering the invocation of Foucault. The most glaring example is his attribution to early moderns of the "Book of Nature" theory of language. Less naively, I'd be interested in seeing how the early moderns interpreted classical technopaigneia, and what modes of meaning they attributed to it.
• Synthesis: Despite the above, the theory of language that Adler attributes to the early moderns resembles a claim by Norbrook: "Milton adopted a Protestantised version of the Renaissance theory that music and poetry had once been indissolubly allied, that the music of the ancients had unusual emotional power because each note was precisely adjusted in pitch and quantity to a corresponding syllable."
  Adler's attention to figure poetry has the potential to drastically revise the projects of scholars explicitly interested in image-texts, including Aston and Ingram. After all, what can be considered piece of print art, when type itself is print art? Gaskell may be interested to describe print art without a "mysterious collaboration" between printing-house and engraving shop. Watt may be interested to think about non-tabular, "illustrated" ballads without the necessary mark-up for expensive woodcuts.
• Application: Of course, Adler's argument regarding Simias' influence on Herbert is interesting, but it remains to be seen whether Latin-Greek figure poetry was sold in England in Herbert's time, much less whether or not Herbert owned any.
  Adler's argument reminds me that all print literature is a visual medium. Type is never far from xylography.