Although his inscription alludes to a second edition, this was not meant to be. In this first edition, first printing, Higgins tells the history of pattern poetry, documenting more than 2000 works. He divides the book by chapters such as Language and Literature, e.g., Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, French, German, Scandinavian, Dutch and Flemish, British, Hispanic, Polish, and Slavic. He also has a chapter on Languages outside European such as Far East, Citrakavyas and other Indian languages, Islamic, and Languages in which no pattern poetry has been reported. In another chapter, he descibes Acrostics, Telestics, Mesostics, Lapidary Inscriptions, Leonine Verse, Magical Inscriptions and Formulae, Mathematical Arrays and Poems, Musical Analogues of Pattern Poetry, Proteus Poems, Rebuses, Shaped Prose, and Sound Poetry. De. Herbert Francke contributes a chapter on Chinese Pattern Texts and Dr. Kalanath Jha on Sandscrit Citrakavyas. Higgins' glossary of terms follows below.ABECEDARIAN VERSE: poetry in which the first word of a line, the subject of the line or all the words of the line are given in alphabetical order.ACROMESOSTICS: poems in which the initial letters of a line and some interior letters line up to form an inscription or intextus.ACROMESOTELESTICS: poems in which both the first and last letters of a line and some interior letters line up to form an intextus or inscription. Often this term means that there is a border around a rectangular poem and the border forms a text.ACROSTICS: poems in which the initial letters of the lines line up to form an inscription or intext.ACROTELESTICS: poems in which the first and last letters of the lines line up to form an inscription or intextus.ANACYCLIC VERSE: poems in which there is more than one way to read a line or the entire poem; this term is usually used to cover palindromes.ANAGRAM: a word formed from the letters of another word by rearranging them.BHANDAS: the stock forms or visual images of Indian citrakavyas, each of which has traditions associated with it.BILDREIM: an early German term for pattern poems.CALIGRAMME: the term coined by Guillaume Apollinaire (1880 1918) to cover a kind of shaped poem, which he believed he had invented or at least been the first to develop systematically.CANCRIZAN: a musical form (from Latin, cancer "crab"), common in the renaissance and baroque periods, in which the composition or part moves up to a central point, then reverses itself and retraces its steps backwards exactly. It is closely analogous to palindromes. In the baroque period the term was occasionally applied to poetry.CARMEN CANCELLATUM: a mesotic with a visual intextus that is "cancelled out" from the background text. Invented by Optatian, this is the most common form of pattern poem in the middle ages.CARMEN FIGURATUM (pl. carmina figurata): the Latin word for pattern poems and, until modern times, the most common of them. Literally it means "figured poems]."CARMEN QUADRATUM (pl. carmina quadrata): literally, "square poems." In Optatian's Latin pattern poetry, this is the best term to describe Optatian's rectangular mesostics. In renaissance pattern poetry, the term has a different meaning, describing pieces which consist of an array of words loosely grouped into a rectangle, which one then reads according to some interior system; for example, moving over the words chessboard fashion.CHRONOGRAM: a way of indicating the year by capitalizing appropriate letters in an inscription to form Roman numerals which add up to form the year. Chronograms are common from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries.CHRONOSTICON: another term for chronogram.CITRAKAVYAS (citra?kavyas): kdzya is the Sanskrit word for "verse." Citrakavyas are, therefore, the verses in the languages of India which are shaped according to the traditions of the various bandhas.CONCRETE POETRY: modern visual poems which are constructed out of arrays of letters such as the alphabet, as opposed to using photographic or conceptual structures that are not visual. The term is especially applied to such works in the 1950s and 1960s.CUBUS: the Latin word for "cube." The term is properly applied to labyrinthi cubici but is occasionally applied to any rectangular poem from the renaissance period.ECHO VERSES: poems in which the last syllable of a line is intended to be repeated to form a second chain of meanings; for example, to answer a question in the line, "Are you going to Capestrano?" "No?"FIGURENGEDICHTE: The German term for pattern poems (q.v.)GREAT DIAGONAL: in any rectangle, the longest possible diagonal, the one which goes from any corner to the opposite corner.HUI?WEN: Chinese palindromes. In the absence of a special terminology for Chinese shaped poems, these are classified among the hui?wen. INTEXT: anglicized form of intextusINTEXTUS (pl. intexti): an inscription or text or even interior verse which is contained within another poem; for example, the text that lines up on an acrostic. Literally the term means "woven," and the description of an intextus as woven into its overall text is apt.LABYRINTH: this term has been applied to many kinds of poetry over the centuries. Basically, a labyrinth is a rectangular (or other geometrically shaped) poem which can be read in several ways, and to read which one must discover the method of ingress.LABYRINTHUS CUBICUS (pl. labyrinthi cubici): labyrinth poems in which each successive line adds or subtracts one letter or word from the line above or below, so that the first and last lines give the whole text. There are also compound arrays of these, for example four labyrinthi cubici arrayed as one large rectangle.LIPOGRAM (from "leipos?" Gr. "to leave," ? gramos," drawing or writing): a text which is deliberately contrived so as to omit one or more letters of the alphabet. The technique was very popular in late antiquity and the middle ages. A fine French example is in de Court (1725), where the author includes five long, fluent letters, each lacking a different vowel. Two entire books in lipogrammatic style are Ritter (1820; 1979) and Wright (1939). Such pieces also exist in Sanskrit, where, per Tuwim (1950), "the author of a Hindu poetic, Dandin, wrote a book, Sasakamaracara'ta ("The adventures of ten princes") where one character is written without any labial consonant, as it is narrated by a man with his lips bitten by his lover.MAZE: in poetry, a maze is an array of words or lines, usually geometrically spaced, so that one follows the lines to blind endings or through a lattice?like weaving of them until one arrives, in due course, at the end of the poem.MESOSTIC: a poem in which some of the letters inside the poem can be aligned to form an intext. MESOTELESTICS: mesostics in which the last letters of each line can be read as an intext.MICROGRAPHY: shaped texts, prose or poetry, in which a preexistent text is arranged to form a visual image. The term usually refers to a genre of Hebrew calligraphy in which passages from the Law or elsewhere in the bible are arranged to make up mythological creatures, geometrical designs, and so forth. PALINDROME: a text which can be read backwards as well as forwards; for example, the line attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte: "Able was I ere I saw Elba."PATTERN POEM: the commonest term for visual poems from before 1900 in which the letters, words or lines are arrayed to make up visual images. Some terms which are synonymous with these, in English and other languages, are: Caligrammas (Spanish); Caligrammes (French); Carmina figurata (Latin, Italian); Figurdigte (Danish, Norwegian); Figurdikter (Swedish); Figurengedichte (German); Figuurdikte (Dutch, Flemish); K'epes dalok (Hungarian); Laberintos de figuras (Portuguese); Poemes figures (French); Poesias de figuras (Spanish); Shaped poems; Shaped verse; Technopeignias. Obviously many languages with pattern poems are missing from this list, but this is because there is no consensus in these languages on terminology, in which case an imported term is usually used.POESIA ARTIFICIOSA (literally, "artful poetry," not necessarily "artificial poetry"), a Latin term, popular in the baroque period, which was the class that included virtually all the special and exceptional forms of poetry that are the subject of this study, not just pattern poetry itself.POESIA VISIVA, an Italian term of the 1960s describing the conceptual visual poetry done especially by Eugenio Miccini and his circle at Firenze, but now applied generally to recent visual poetry which employs photographs, to distinguish it from the more purely letter?oriented concrete poetry.PROTEUS POEMS: poems in which a limited set of words is permuted line by line ? "she loves me/ me she loves/ loves she me.SHAPED POEMS: pattern poems which arc shaped mimetically, pattern poems exclusive of labyrinths.SOUND POETRY: poems in which the sound of the poem is structured more than the sense?the intermedium between music and poetry. TAUTOGRAMS: sound poems in which the sound comes from the repetition of a letter or word, a highly alliterative genre which was popular in the late middle ages through the seventeenth century.TECHNOPAIGNION (pl. technopaignia, anglicized pl. technopaignias): a Greek term, from "techno?" (art or technique) ? "paignia" ( = "peignia," games), used in classical rhetoric to describe any unconventional display of technical virtuosity. The term came to be applied especially to pattern poetry through the renaissance period. The spelling with an "ei," while technically a corruption, is the more usual one.TELESTIC: a poem in which the terminal letters of each line add up to form an intextus.TUGRAS (tughras, tugras): a Turkish term for calligraphic inscriptions formed by distorting the shapes of the letters of monogrammatic texts to make up designs, sometimes abstract and sometimes mimetic. One finds tugras side by side with pattern poems in Persian arid alone in most Islamic art literatures. VERSUS CANCRINI: verses which read the same backwards as forwards? not letter by letter. as do palindromes, but word by word. "Cancrini," like "cancrizan" (q.v.), derives from the Latin cancer (crab), and the verse is supposedly suggestive of the walk of a crab, which is apparently sideways.VERSUS INTEXTUS: an intext which is also a poem. "Intextus" (q.v., = "woven") is the interior or cross text of a member of the acrostic family or of a labyrinth. It is absolutely wrong, although it is commonly done, to make the plural of this term "versi intexti" since "versus" is a fourth declension noun and its plural is therefore the same as its singular. The correct plural is therefore "versus intexti." "Intextus" ( = intext) can, however, be used as a noun substantive, and it can therefore be "intexti" in the plural. The term is particularly helpful in speaking of such elaborate intexti as those of Optatian.VISUAL POETRY: the intermedium between literary and visual art. However, this term is often used synonymously with poesia visiva to distinguish recent works from concrete poetry.WORD SQUARE: a rectangular array of letters in which the letters can be react in virtually all possible vertical or horizontal directions meaningfully, thus making such pieces akin to magic squares and mathematics. The best known such word square is the "Enigma of Sator," but there are also many occult and related pieces that are similar. XI?RHO: a traditional monogram of Jesus Christ, formed of an X with a vertical line in its center, this last capped with a right loop ? the letters "xi" and "rho" of the Greek alphabet. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.