page_title: Concrete poetry
section_title: Development
hierarchical_section_title: Concrete poetry / Development
caption_attribution_description: English: Image of "Easter Wings", a "pattern poem" published in 1633 by George Herbert. As a pattern poem, the work is not only meant to be read, but its shape is meant to be appreciated: In this case, the poem was printed (original image here shownA) on two pages of a book, sideways, so that the lines suggest two birds flying upward, with wings spread out.
context_page_description: Concrete poetry is an arrangement of linguistic elements in which the typographical effect is more important in conveying meaning than verbal significance. It is sometimes referred to as visual poetry, a term that has now developed a distinct meaning of its own. Concrete poetry relates more to the visual than to the verbal arts although there is a considerable overlap in the kind of product to which it refers. Historically, however, concrete poetry has developed from a long tradition of shaped or patterned poems in which the words are arranged in such a way as to depict their subject.
context_section_description: Though the term ‘concrete poetry’ is modern, the idea of using letter arrangements to enhance the meaning of a poem is old. Such shaped poetry was popular in Greek Alexandria during the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE, although only the handful which were collected together in the Greek Anthology now survive. Examples include poems by Simmias of Rhodes in the shape of an egg, wings and a hatchet, as well as Theocritus’ pan-pipes.
  The post-Classical revival of shaped poetry seems to begin with the Gerechtigkeitsspirale (spiral of justice), a relief carving of a poem at the pilgrimage church of St. Valentin in the German town of Hesse. The text is carved in the form of a spiral on the front of one of the church pews and is one of several decorative designs there created in 1510 by master carpenter Erhart Falckener.
  Early religious examples of shaped poems in English include "Easter Wings" and "The Altar" in George Herbert's The Temple (1633) and Robert Herrick's "This crosstree here", which is set in the shape of a cross, from his Noble Numbers (1647). An alternative religious precursor is Micrography, a technique for creating visual images used by Hebrew artists, which involves organizing small arrangements of Biblical texts such that they form images which illustrate the subject of the text. Micrography allows the creation of images of natural objects by Jews without directly breaking the prohibition of creating "graven images" that might be interpreted as idolatry. The technique is now used by both religious and secular artists and is similar to the use of Arabic texts in Islamic calligraphy.
  European secular examples include poems in the shape of wine flagons by Rabelais and Charles-François Panard, and the Slovene France Prešeren's "A Toast" (Zdravljica, 1844) with stanzas in the shape of wine-glasses. A popular example was Lewis Carroll's The Mouse's Tale, published in 1865 in his Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. This approach was taken up at the start of the 20th century by Guillaume Apollinaire in his Calligrammes (1918), with poems in, among others, the shape of a necktie, a fountain and raindrops running down a window.
  In that era also there were typographical experiments by members of avant-garde movements such as Futurism, Dada and Surrealism in which lay-out moved from an auxiliary expression of meaning to artistic primacy. Thus the significance of the sound poetry in Marinetti’s Zang Tumb Tumb (1912) is expressed through pictorial means. Similarly in Germany Raoul Hausmann claimed that the typographic style of his 'Phonemes' allowed the reader to recognise what sound was intended. In Russia the Futurist poet Vasily Kamensky went so far as to term the typography of his Tango with Cows, published in 1914, 'ferro-concrete poems' (zhelezobetonnye poemy), long before the name became current elsewhere.
  A further move away from overt meaning occurred where ‘poems’ were simplified to a simple arrangement of the letters of the alphabet. Louis Aragon, for example, exhibited the sequence from a to z and titled it "Suicide" (1926), while Kurt Schwitters’ "ZA (elementary)" has the alphabet in reverse, and the Catalan writer Josep Maria Junoy  (1885-1955) placed just the letters Z and A at the top and bottom of the page under the title "Ars Poetica".
caption: George Herbert's "Easter Wings" (1633), printed sideways on facing pages so that the lines would call to mind angels flying with outstretched wings
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