Graphic Poetics: Poetry as Visual ArtConcrete', 'pattern' or 'shaped' poems are well documented as experimental curiosities. While giving some attention to this sub-genre the book shifts the focus to the ways in which visual form manifests itself in traditional verse, examining poems by Milton, Wordsworth, Eliot, Olson, T.E. Hulme, Auden, Williams, Larkin and Charles Tomlinson. It examines how the tactile presence of the poem on the page transcends the routine distinctions between genre and historical context, emerging as a significant but largely unexamined contribution to modernist poetics. The interpretative methodology is radical, adapting Wollheim's twofold thesis grounded in the aesthetics of visual art to the author's own concept of the double pattern Graphic Poetics challenges the accepted protocols of reading and interpreting verse and considers how poetry is involved in a dialogue with such theoreticians as Derrida. Introducing a new perspective on how poems work and on how they generate effects, it shows how poets use devices previously unrecognised and unacknowledged, techniques which are more commonly associated with visual arts than with literature. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
1 The Double Pattern | 3 |
2 Silent Poetics | 16 |
3 Critical Antipathy | 35 |
4 The Poet in the Poem | 51 |
Two Versions of Free Verse | 73 |
6 Poems as Pictures | 97 |
7 The Sliding Scale | 117 |
8 The Sliding Scale and Recent Literary History | 141 |
9 Conclusion | 194 |
Notes | 203 |
| 205 | |
| 211 | |
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Common terms and phrases
able abstract actually aesthetic allow appearance arbitrary argued artefact attempt awareness become begin blank called Chapter close communicative complex concrete condition connect consider continuity conventions create critical cummings dimension distinction double pattern early effect elements exist experience figure formal free verse function graphic hear impression interpretative involves language linear linguistic literally look Lost material meaning measure medium metaphor metrical Milton mind move movement naturalization never notion object opening operates original painting pause perception performance picture poem poet poetic poetry possible presence printed prose reader reference referential regarded regular relation relationship representation represented rhyme rhythm scale sense sequence shape shift signifying signs silent similar simultaneously sound space spatial speech spoken statement static structure successive syntactic syntax technique temporal tension tion traditional unit visual visual form voice Williams’s words writing written