Journal of Novel Applied Sciences

Available online at www.jnasci.org

©2014 JNAS Journal-2014-3-7/771-776
ISSN 2322-5149 ©2014 JNAS

A Journey to Poetry of Geometrical Shapes from

the Ancient Time to Poetry of John Hollander
Mehrdad Moazami Goudarzi1*, Leila Baradaran Jamili2 and Bahman Zarrinjooee2

1- MA Student, Postgraduate Department of English Language and Literature, College of Humanities,

Boroujerd Branch, Islamic Azad University, Boroujerd, Iran
2- Assistant Professor of Postgraduate Department of English Language and Literature, College of
Humanities, Boroujerd Branch, Islamic Azad University, Boroujerd, Iran

Corresponding author: Mehrdad Moazami Goudarzi

ABSTRACT: The paper investigates the relationship between geometrical pattern poetry and John
Hollander’s poetry (1929–2013) and the way by which the meaning is transformed through the specific
geometrical shapes. Pattern poetry, as a subcategory of literary art, mixes together the literal and pictorial
components to create poems including an aesthetic entity. To comprehend a piece of pattern poem, the
readers observe the poem as well as hear it. According to George Puttenham (1529-90), Marcia Birken
(1954- ) and Anne Coon (1952- ), geometrical pattern poetry―owning a considerable geometrical element
such as plane, labyrinth, geometry and math figures―is of those poems involving geometrical shapes and
figures. They divide pattern poems into different mathematical and geometrical categories and if a poem
enters into their category, it is a pattern poem, unless it cannot be counted as geometrical poem. Hollander
is one of the modern poets whose poems are considered as pattern poetry. He was under the influence
of geometry and mathematics and this influence led him to write poems that are in accordance with the
geometrical rules. When one reads his poems, it seems that he/she is involved in a geometrical labyrinth
or maze and the way-out or the solution must be found through the formulas related to geometry; hence,
Hollanderian Pattern Poetry can be categorized as geometrical poems.

Keywords: Geometry, Mathematics, Labyrinth, Pattern Poetry, Hollanderian Pattern Poetry.

INTRODUCTION

Pattern poetry has got a long lifetime along with different cultures, nations, and periods. Even its history can be
considered as long as the history of literature and all the nations who had a hand in literature started their literary
careers with pattern poetry. The notion of visual or pattern poetry (sometimes referred to as concrete poetry) has its
roots from the time of Greece and Roman Empire. The narrow histories of the ancestral visual poetry types and
genres more often are centered on Western European traditions perhaps with nods to the Mediterranean Basin. The
primary ancestors considered the variety of visual poems surviving from Greek, Latin, other Western European
languages and perhaps Hebrew. As Karl Kempton writes “there may be a gesture or more to Egyptian hieroglyphics
because of the impact of ancient Egyptian culture on popular Western European culture” (2). If fact, the elongated
and long history of pattern poetry is the wish and desire of man in order to manipulate the visual and literary concepts
and to link the knowledge and understanding of these two zones together to create an artistic and aesthetic unity.
Shape or concrete poetry has no representation in only one location or even era, but it is more a kind of “maze within
a maze covered over with obscurity, an attempt which recurs century after century to make the synthesis, in almost
every Western literature and many Eastern ones” (Higgins, 3).
One of the initial recognized pieces of pattern poetry is one consisting of two manuscripts on the faces of the
Phaistos Disk—“a disk of fired clay from the Minoan palace of Phaistos” (Britannica, 2014)—on the Greek
island of Crete, possibly dating to the middle or late Minoan Bronze Age (2nd millennium BC) which is about 15 cm
(5.9 in) in diameter and covered on both sides with a spiral of stamped symbols—which is in the Heraklion Museum.
The main stream kept its routine and there were some other pattern or shape poems with the subjects such as
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religion and praising of the emperors—the poets such as African Optatian, whose poems were in the form of eulogies
and in praises of Constantine the Great—until it became the time of Medieval Literature. There were some works
such as “a carmen cancellatum” by Boniface Winifried (680-755), a poem on the subject of a cross written by historian
Paul the Deacon (720-799), other poems coming from the period of Carolingian—pertaining to the Frankish dynasty
that ruled France and Germany during the 8th to 10th centuries AD—by Alcuin, and another poem written by
Josephus Scottus (? - 804) who was Charlemagne's private teacher in ninth century. In his book, Pattern Poetry:
Guide to an Unknown Literature, Dick Higgins writes, “they are joyful meditations covering the principal points of the
Christian faith as Hrabanus saw them” (7).
The first part of this paper refers to an explanation of Hollander’s geometrical poetry and the new way he has
brought into the realm of poetry. Then by the help of the critics, such as Puttenham, Birken and Coon, the formula of
geometrical poetry is to be clarified; i.e., a poem is considered as geometrical poem if all the features (such as the
shape, length, number of words, number of lines, thickness of lines and so on) they have enumerated will fix the
poem. Furthermore, the selected poems (“Swan and Shadow,” “Graven Image,” “Crise De Coeur,” and “Old Mazda
Lamp”) are discussed through the lenses of geometrical poetry.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

Poetry will go beyond the common routine of literature when the poets focus on the visual characteristics of the
works they compose. Approximately for more than centuries, many poets have considered the bodily planning of
alphabetical letters and words as very essential dimensions in writing poetry, whether the words and the letters are
drawn or painted by hand, typed by type machines, or computerized. These availabilities in the form of composing
poetry open up a new way for the poets to create pieces of poems that have many characteristics in common with
mathematics and especially geometry. Birken and Coon write that “some pattern poems have also taken on familiar
conventional forms, such as the cross, the altar, and the egg. George Puttenham, a contemporary of William
Shakespeare (1564-1616), provided Elizabethans with guidelines (fig 3) for using geometric shapes in poetry” (9).
Therefore, in poetry and significantly in pattern poetry, if one searches for signs of geometrical poetry, he should be
in search of finding basic geometrical shapes illustrated in the following picture:

Figure 3. Possible Geometric Shapes in Poetry

In The Arte of English Poesie, Puttenham states that, “[i]t is said by such as professe[d] the Mathematical[l]
sciences, that all things stand by proportion, and that without it nothing could stand to be good or beautiful” (64). He
also adds that “proportion Poetical[l]” rests in five qualities: staff (or stanza), measure (or meter), concord (or rhyme),
situation (or placement of rhyme), and figure, or what he considers as the “ocular representation” (Puttenham, 65).
Puttenham believes that there are many important elements for a poet while composing a poem, but the most
important one in writing a geometrical poem is the last which is ocular representation—of or pertaining to the eyes
or eyesight or visual sense. It means that a geometrical poem should follow at least one of the geometrical shapes
in the picture. In figure 3, there are some single shapes that are geometrically considered as basic shapes such as
square, circle, oval, and so on, while there are other shapes that are mixtures or combinations of the basic and
regular figures, including triangles and quadrilaterals.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The development of pattern poetry continues to the 19th and 20th centuries when we have the poets such as E.
E. Cummings (1894-1962) with his best-known poem “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r” (“grasshopper” for the uninitiated), which
releases the impatient vigor of the grasshopper. Maybe the most distinguished figure of 20th century pattern poetry

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is John Hollander who has published the collection Types of Shape (1969), where poems are shaped and decorated
very similar to Pastoral shapes of Ancient Greek figures and poems to narrate their topics, themes, contents and
stories in the cover of a poem. Possibly, the widely recognized and known poem among Hollander’s poems is the
mirrored “Swan and Shadow”—referring to a kind of imitation for the image of a swan and its shadow in the water
(fig. 1)—and the geometrical shape poem “Graven Image”—referring to the picture of a star that is shining from very
far away (fig. 2).

Figure 1. “Swan and Shadow” Figure 2. “Graven Image”

John Hollander, who lived in Woodbridge, Connecticut, was a judge for numerous competitions on recitation,
and later he said that he enjoyed a lot when he was working with students on their poetry and teaching it. He put an
emphasis on the fact that in reading poetry, the most important element is to hear poems out loud as well as to see
them in a pictorial form. In this regard, he says that “A good poem satisfies the ear. It creates a story or picture that
grabs you, informs you and entertains you” (qtd. in Wolfe, 3). He had also a great interest in translations from Yiddish
language using pictorial alphabets. Hollander typically scripted his poems on a computer, but if there was no way to
spring up his inspiration, he stated that, “I’ve been known to start poems on napkins and scraps of paper, too” (ibid).
His good sense of geometry led him to be a poet who mostly wished to manipulate geometry and literature to each
other. He was also well-talented in drawing pictures and shapes that were geometrically balanced. Furthermore, Karl
Kirchwey, a modern poet, was under the influence of Hollander and studied under Hollander at Yale University. He
was also skilled at writing geometrical poems which might be the reason of Hollander’s teachings. Hollander trained
him that “it was possible to build a life around the task of writing poetry” and especially geometrical pattern poetry
(qtd. in Swansburg, 5). Kirchwey explains Hollander’s excitement and passion of poetry as, “Since he is a poet
himself [...] he conveyed a passion for that knowledge as a source of current inspiration” (ibid). Therefore, Hollander’s
poetry has the passion and excitement of literature in all its parts amongst them the part of visual appearance is the
most deliberate one.

Geometry in Hollanderian Pattern Poetry

Hollander’s poetry is not far from such a description of geometrical poetry. He manipulates many shapes and
forms to create poems with clear geometrical shapes such as circle, heart, column, square and the mixture of them
that convey the visual representation of their meanings. An obvious example of Hollander’s use of such a geometrical
technique is to be found on his poem named “Crise De Coeur” which is a geometrical poem that illustrates the heart
of human being. The poem is the story of a heart being narrated by the heart itself; the way how it is narrating the
miserable story of its life and begs the help from the listener of the poem. All five elements of Puttenham including
staff (or stanza), measure (or meter), concord (or rhyme), situation (or placement of rhyme), as well as ocular
representations (or figures) are considered by Hollander in composing this poem:

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Figure 4. “Crise De Coeur”

An important feature of geometry is that the shapes are of very regular and similar pattern of drawing. If the poet,
for example, is drawing a heart, there should be a balance and similarity between two parts of the heart. The lines
should be the same both in length and thickness. When writing a geometrical poem, the poet should create a kind of
balance and harmony between parts and whole; it means the number of the words and the lengths of the lines have
got outstanding importance. In composing geometrical poems, the poet should follow the same procedure as he is
drawing geometrical shapes. In the above picture, man can see that the poem is fully geometrical and Hollander can
deliberately express his own idea of suffering of heart in the form of geometry and shapes. The rhymes and the
meters are in balance with each other and even the number of the words used is counted and they are the same in
the symmetrical lines. For instance, in the first line there are two words and till the last line the balance is repeated
and it has two words. Moreover, the poem consists of thirty-one lines which fifteen of them are in the upper part and
the other fifteen are in the lower part. There is one line which acts like a symmetrical borderline that halves the poem
into two similar pieces.
A geometrical poem, therefore, to some extent should have its own self-reflective image within both its shape
and content. There are some words in “Crise De Coeur,” that are considered as the pictorial word itself (in the first
half) and the shadow of the same words in the second half of the poem. This is perceived through reading the poem,
while considering the symmetrical line to divide the poem into two parts. In line 16 of the poem, which is a dividing
tool for the poet, Hollander shows both geometrical symmetry of the shape and the shadow of the reflected words.
Hollander writes:
I stood in my round-shouldered pride you struck Some fell impulse seized me as if for a moment the surface I
clung to had blank like that As if a glimpse of folded arm or breast or thigh curved under itself plunging deep into its
own shadow had unhung me quite Or as if some loss as of dry leaves blown across marble corridors (Line, 14-18)
These lines indicate that while having a symmetrical balance and harmony, the labyrinth or maze would be more
clear and easier to be solved when one considers the words as the opposites for each other. When there is symmetry,
the reflection of the words is more perceptible and tangible. In line 15, the word ‘surface’ is mirrored and matched to
the word ‘deep’ in line 17 in terms of both geometrical symmetry and meaning symmetry. Moreover, the words ‘light’
and ‘shadow’; ‘seized’ and ‘unhung’ and so forth have the same mirror-like reflection harmonizing the poem
structurally and unifying the readers’ mind with whatever in the mind of the poet.
In the poem, there are also many other words used by Hollander being related to mathematical and geometrical
structures and vocabularies which describe or draw attractive geometrical shapes to add not only the beauties of
meaning, but also the truth beyond them. The words have their own exceptional meanings in geometry and the
equivalent meaning is well thought-out by the poet to convey the same message in the body of poetry. Instances of
these geometrical words consist of ‘erect’ (line, 4) meaning to be straight, ‘wide’ (line, 4) meaning to be extended,
‘point’ meaning the small measurement used to measure font size, ‘curve’ (line, 16) meaning being bend, and ‘half’
(line, 30) meaning one part of two equal parts. Composing such lines of “Crise De Coeur,” Hollander contemplates
himself to be a mathematician and geometrician rather than to be only a poet; thus, this poem is a geometrical one
forming the view point of shape and meaning.
Marcia Birken and Anne C. Coon, in their book Discovering Patterns in Mathematics and Poetry, state that “[i]t
is important to remember that Puttenham’s diagram was not intended to be a guide to mathematicians, but a help for
poets,” and they add “Puttenham provides many illustrations of how the geometric forms may be used by poets” (98).
Puttenham’s attitude toward poetry and the geometrical poetry sparks a very sharp light in the mind of great poets
who compose shape poems in a more deliberate way near to geometrical shapes. Approximately, fifty years after he

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expressed such a guideline, “Easter Wings” as one of the most well-known pattern poems in English was written by
George Herbert (1593-1633) who planned two head-to-head triangles in a way that it seems to be two wings fasten
to each other. The poem can be seen both vertically and horizontally.
Based on such an idea, the diagram—Birken and Coon specialize it only for poets—is highly considered by
Hollander in his poem, especially the one named “Old Mazda Lamp,” which follows at least two basic geometrical
shapes including the Roundel or Sphere and the Cylinder. In order to write such a poem, Hollander uses two
geometrical shapes and manipulates them to create a lamp-shaped poem:

Figure 5. “Old Mazda Lamp”

The poem drawn above is the story in which someone, possibly the lamp itself or someone else, is narrating the
moment of turning on and of the lamp and providing the light and removing the darkness. By using shapes and visual
imagery, Hollander compares the situation with the mind of human being. A lighted room is compared to a
knowledgeable mind being bright by means of lamp that is a metaphor standing for knowledge; moreover, a bare
mind is like a dark room that no lamp is on and metaphorically there is no knowledge. Using such a geometrical
technique, the poet wants to express his perspective about a knowledgeable person through the visual image created
by an image that everyone sees in his/her life every day.
Like Hollander’s previous poems, “Old Mazda Lamp” draws the attention of the readers first to the shape and
then to the connotation and the idea conveyed in the poem. The miscellany and then the manipulation of the words
are of astonishing importance due to the fact that it is the poem of the words which are intermingled to draw a shape
and then to convey the meaning. When looking at a lamp, one perceives that a sharp point on the top of the lamp is
both the initial and the final point where the glass of the lamp has been completed. Destroying this high-pitched point
is equal to destroying the entire lamp and consequently its structure. Hence, this point is the most vital part, playing
a very substantial role which is both the end and the beginning. Comparatively, in the poem, in the first and second
lines, the words ‘on’ and ‘off’, besides being the key points in the meaning, should be very sharp and small words in
size at the top of the lamp itself. The poem sets out on a journey with ‘[o]n’ and ends the journey with ‘light’ (line, 38)
which is the reason of being on; this leads the reader to appreciate a symmetry in the meaning of the poem which
acts like a cyclical order existing in geometrical shapes.
The number of the lines is thirty-eight and their length changes as the real size of a lamp increases or decreases,
creating a harmony in the unique structure of the poem. Surprisingly, if one wishes to compare the measures of the
poem with the measures of a real lamp, the only difference would be the degree of scale, i.e., the poem is
wholeheartedly matches the lamp but the scale is different. Hollander visualizes the various vicissitudes of life of a
lamp into a very deep understanding of life of a man. He wants to use the visual power of mind in order to convey
the meaning indirectly. Turing a lamp off and on which is one of the most tangible phenomenon in human’s daily life
is a strange comparison that Hollander uses to convey his idea but through shape poetry.

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CONCLUSION

In the world of literature, poetry is considered as a form of compressed and complex language expressing
multifaceted feelings. To comprehend the manifold interpretations and meanings of such a complex piece of poem,
one has to scrutinize the existing words and phrases from the dimensions of rhythm, sound, images, metaphors, and
shapes or patterns. John Hollander, as a well-talented poet who breathed the new air of life into old-style poetry
forms, and whose poetry collections focused on a visionary, mythic, and shape oriented issues, considered poetry
as even a phenomenon around which man can build a life. He was mostly interested in writing shape poems by
which he expressed his ideas.
In these poems, he enjoys an experimental form in which the shapes of the poems and their meanings are
interrelated to each other, and through reading them it is possible to reach the other. Hollander’s structure of poems
is taken from the Geometric Forms (classified for the poets) by Puttenham, Birken and Coon. They considered some
of the shapes as the basic figures for poets who are to compose pattern poems and Hollander used them as the
framework and then created his poems such as “Swan and Shadow,” “Graven Image,” “Crise De Coeur,” and “Old
Mazda Lamp” based on that theory. His poems are fully geometrical with balanced shapes to help the readers
understand the meaning even without a full reading of the text.
Consequently, Hollander is believed to be the granddaddy of geometrical poetry, his selected poems are
contemplated to be the valuable foundations, sources and motivations for those who are absorbed in writing pattern
poems, especially in the geometrical and mathematical sub-category, and likewise those who are in search of
discovering a path to have a universal, general and overall appreciation on the literature of past and present and
their relationship with each other through the lenses of geometry. His special sort of poetry consists a wide range of
poems enjoying outlandish, strange, or even unrealistic shapes as well as realistic and ordinary ones, containing the
above-mentioned “Swan and shadow,” having two sorts, either with or without the mirror image in the lake; “Graven
Image,” the picture of a star shining from very far away, “Crise De Coeur,” a heart narrating the story of its own, and
“Old Mazda Lamp,” the existence and non-existence of knowledge in human mind. He, in fact, gives his perception
and understanding of the modern life in the amazing combination of mathematical and geometrical structures, while
establishing at the same time the Hollanderian Pattern Poetry.

REFERENCES

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Higgins D. 1987. Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature. New York: State U of New York P.
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9 September, n. p.
Hollander J. 1969. Types of Shapes. Connecticut: Yale UP.
Kempton K. 1990. “Visual Poetry: A Brief History of Ancestral Roots and Modern Traditions.” An International Journal of Visual
Poetry. Vol. 3: 4, n. p.
Puttenham G. 1970. The Arte of English Poesie. Eds. G. D. Willcock and A. Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
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