The Graphics of Verse
Authors: Matore Daniel 
Published: December 2023

Why did poetry become a visual art? Why did verse begin to appeal to the eye rather than the ear? Why do the pages of Victorian poetry look so different from those of twentieth-century verse? Exploiting the expressive possibilities of print—from spacing and indentation to alignment and typeface—is one of the defining ways in which poetry was modernized in the twentieth century. While the experimental mise-en-page of European poets, from the French writers Stéphane Mallarmé and Guillaume Apollinaire to Filippo Marinetti and the Italian Futurists, has been well documented, the no-less-important typographical explorations of poets writing in English have been largely neglected. This monograph confronts a major unanswered question in modernist, postwar, and contemporary literature: namely, why did British and American poets, from as early as 1910 right up to the present day, choose to experiment with the design and layout of the printed page? My work aims to provide the first detailed account of this lineage of literary style, investigating how typography was conceived as a form of musical notation, a means of realizing new rhythmical possibilities, and as a way of critiquing the new media languages of film and advertising. It surveys the work of canonical poets across the twentieth century such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Hope Mirlees, William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, David Jones, Denise Levertov, Charles Olson, and J. H. Prynne. I consider whether in the wake of free verse typography emerged as a method of preserving the poet’s voice in the uncertain soundscape of verse that had dispensed with traditional metres. Typography was often utilised as a tabula rasa of style, to bring about drastic reworkings of how poetry communicated. Chief amongst these reworkings is the resilient belief that the printed page could function like a musical score and notate how a poem was to sound: every pitch, pause, and accent. Research into the neumes of medieval monks, for example, spurs and grounds Pound’s experiments with line breaking and unorthodox spacing in his lyrics. This notational theory, I claim, is turbocharged by a technological poetics, furnished with models from acoustics and linguistics, which impels poets to believe typography can be systematized in such a manner that it inerrantly transmits the poet’s voice. Print, it was hoped, could work like the stylus of a gramophone or the spool of a tape recorder. Typography was entrusted with bringing dead voices to life. Cribbing eccentrically from the languages of ophthalmology and optics, poets began to elaborate the idea of a kinetics of the reading eye whose tempo and trajectory the poet could determine through print. I argue that it is through appropriating and transforming the typography of their verse that modernist poets articulate their sense of disenfranchisement within and opposition to mainstream print and graphical cultures. Through analysing unpublished essays and private correspondence, I claim that modernist poets believed mass print culture encoded uniform reading habits in the very motions of the eye. Co-opting and revolutionizing typography was understood as a means of rupturing entrenched habits of thought. Letters to typesetters and printers, as well as marginalia in drafts and proofs gleaned from my archival work, show that the publishing process was envisaged as a political battleground. Realizing their typographical idiosyncrasies down to the smallest point and hair-line space was seen to reclaim a province of material culture, such that scrutinizing copy with microscopic intensity was conceived of as a civic responsibility. To regulate typography was to watch over the public sphere and control the shape of ideas. Through archival research into the genesis of typography as well as the relationships these poets had with their typesetters and publishers, I assess how the materiality of composition and publication impinged upon poetic style. Experimenting with typography changed the way poets sketched and produced their verse. The typewriter was adopted by poets for the first time in the early part of the century, and I show how it was used as a tool to mechanize the design of verse. By tracing the evolution of autograph manuscripts, typescripts, and proofs, I have uncovered idiosyncratic notations and forms of mensuration whereby poets tried to engineer the layout of their work with quasi-mathematical exactitude. Numbers, arrows, and lines appear so that the poet’s notebook starts to look like an engineer’s blueprint. Through examinations of unpublished papers, my research shows that poets formulated new methods of drafting to formulate their byzantine typographical designs as well as typesetting rubrics to communicate their graphical schemes. The gestation of poetry embroiled these writers in pitched battles with publishers and implicated them in the nuts and bolts of the printing press. Poets of the last century, I argue, rewrote their job description and became composite figures, annexing the roles of the typesetter and designer.