Pattern poems and a Proteus poem by Pubilius Optatianus Porhyrius (4th century AD)

Whilst re-reading Between Poetry and Painting by Dom Sylvester Houédard and searching the internet for his visual references I found pattern poems and Proteus poems by Pubilius Optatianus Porhyrius.

An essay by J Stephan Edwards 'The Carmina of Pubilius Optatianus Porhyrius and the Creative Process' explains:

Optatianus produced three distinct types of poetry, two of which are imitations of earlier forms, and one type that was an original creation. Taken as a body of work, the Carmina are part of an evolving tradition of poetry known as technopaignion. This type of poetry is meant to display the skill of the writer for arranging words in a complex way so as to create either a visual pattern with the verses themselves, known as pattern poetry, or to conceal a text within the poem for the reader to ‘puzzle out,’ or versus intexti. A limited number of pattern poems pre–date Optatianus’ work, most originating in Greece. Simmias and Theocritus are the best known creators of Greek pattern poetry. Optatianus’ pattern poems are probably a continuation of that Greek tradition and represent the genesis of his creative process. Similarly, Optatianus also wrote one known proteus poem, the words of which can be re–arranged to create new verses while maintaining the established poetic meter. There are no known examples of versus intexti prior to Optatianus, so that he is thus credited with having invented that form. He did so with amazing virtuosity. The intexti vary from simple acrostics to complex patterns that produce a graphic design within the text of the poem, a kind of self–contained illustration. As further evidence of his remarkable skill, a number of the poems also contain proteus poems, while others have intexti that can be transliterated from Latin to Greek. A minority of the poems goes so far as to incorporate all of these elements into one carmen, a masterful achievement of skill and inventiveness.

An essay by Florian Cramer 'Combinatory Poetry and Literature in the Internet'  goes on to talk about the 'Proteus' poem Carmen XXV in more detail:

I Ardua componunt felices carmina Musae
II dissona conectunt diversis vincula metris
III scrupea pangentes torquentes pectora vatis
IV undique confusis constabunt singula verbis

 All words printed in the first and the fourth column of the poem and all words in the second and third make up two sets of words which can be arbitarily shuffled with each other.  The words in the fifth column are fixed, thereby ensuring that the poem will remain hexametric despite its words shuffling.....  In its initial notation, or state, the poem tells of dysharmonic junctions, uneven meters, rough tones and confused words tormenting the singer.  Optatianus Porfyrius, an important formal innovator of European pattern poetry, makes his poem an aesthetic self-reflection which, jumbling its own words, performs and confuses itself simultaneously. Optatianus’ Carmen XXV became paradigmatic for poetry when Julius Caesar Scaliger coined the term “Proteus verse” for word permutation poems in his 1561 Poetices, and made them a canonical poetical form for the century to come.