“The Altar” is an example of pattern poetry. In pattern poems it is not just the words on the page that have meaning, but also the very way the words are laid out—in other words, typography. The first examples we have of pattern poems are from a text called the Greek Anthology, which collected ancient poetry from the 3rd to 2nd centuries BCE. There we find poems shaped like eggs, wings, or axes. These were often originally inscribed onto ritual objects or statues.
It was George Herbert who popularized the pattern poem in English. Even though he is strongly associated with the genre, he actually only produced a handful of them. After Herbert’s death some people dismissed him as a writer who wrote gimmicky poems shaped like the things they describe. Herbert is still mostly associated with “The Altar” and “Easter Wings,” but the vast majority of his poetry was not patterned. Some of his contemporaries also tried their hand at the form, like the poet Robert Herrick who wrote “This crosstree here,” which was printed in the shape of a cross.
The pattern poem has continued to have an afterlife. Lewis Carroll included a pattern poem called “The Mouse’s Tale” in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). In the twentieth century, various avant-garde and experimental poets began producing pattern poetry. French-language poet Guillaume Apollinaire’s 1918 book Calligrammes included poems shaped like everyday objects, such as a necktie. In the 1950s a group of poets in Brazil including Augusto de Campos launched a movement called Concrete Poetry, which was partly inspired by the tradition of pattern poetry. More recently the American poet George Starbuck has kept the genre alive with his “Poem in the Shape of a Potted Christmas Tree” (2003).
