Term for poetry that mimics what it describes
You might be looking for mimesis (adjective: mimetic). Here's the Wikipedia entry.
The word you are likely to encounter in a Renaissance poetry class is the scholarly term technopaegnia,¹ ancient Greek for “games of skill”.² It encompasses all kinds of interplay between the words of a poem and its structure, including (but not limited to) picture poems, acrostics, and other such puzzles.³[PDF]Technopaegnia is not originally an English word, but is “surely an everyday term in literary theory”⁴.
The four references noted above are highly interesting in their own lights, and I recommend them to anyone who has a few minutes.
Acknowledgement: Texas poet Michael Helsem, one of my go-to poetry experts, kindly suggested the word.
If it were for a single word, one would call it autological, which the OED calls ‘Of a word, esp. an adjective: having or representing the property it denotes. Opposed to heterological adj.’ It gives three citations for this sense:
- 1926 F.P. Ramsey in Proc. London Math. Soc. 25 358
Let us call adjectives whose meanings are predicates of them, like ‘short’, autological; others heterological. - 1947 H. Reichenbach Elem. Symbolic Logic (1948) vi. 220 Let us comprise as autological all properties whose names have the property they denote.
- 1952 R.L. Wilder Introd. Found. Math. iii. 75
Is the adjective ‘heterological’ either autological or heterological?
For example curt, pentasyllabic, and sesquipedalian all count as autological because they are self-descriptive. I don’t know that there is a particular word that’s exclusive to poetry, but this double-dactyl by Roger L. Robison surely counts:
Long-short-short, long-short-short
Dactyls in dimeter,
Verse form with choriambs
(Masculine rhyme):
One sentence (two stanzas)
Hexasyllabically
Challenges poets who
Don’t have the time.
In music criticism, the concepts of 'word painting' and 'eye music' are well-esablished. This is when the subject of a passage of music is literally reflected in the way the music is constructed. A trivial example is when an operatic character descends into hell, and the music will take a distinctive downward trend.
However, it can get much more interesting if the shape of the musical notation itself reflects some aspect of the subject matter. For example, the theme of Elgar's Enigma Variations is sometimes said (without much evidence I suspect) to be a visual copy of the shape of a stretch of the Malvern Hills that Elgar loved. However, many more examples date back to the Renaissance and Medieval periods, where elaborate musical puns and rebuses (rebi?) were employed - perhaps to liven up some dull workaday music...
Perhaps this idea has occasionally been borrowed by literary folk?