Concrete poetry is a type of writing where the way words look on the page is more important than the actual meaning of the words. It is sometimes called visual poetry, and this term now has its own separate meaning. Concrete poetry focuses more on how things look than on the words themselves, though there is some overlap with other types of writing. In the past, concrete poetry came from a tradition of poems that were shaped or arranged in patterns to show their subject.
Development
The idea of using the shape of letters to help explain the meaning of a poem is not new, even though the term "concrete poetry" is modern. In ancient Greece, during the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE, poets in Alexandria created poems that looked like objects, such as eggs, wings, and hatchets. These poems are part of a collection called the Greek Anthology, and only a few examples remain today. One example is a poem by Simmias of Rhodes shaped like an egg, and another by Theocritus shaped like pan-pipes.
A revival of shaped poetry began in the 16th century with a carving called the Gerechtigkeitsspirale, or "Spiral of Justice," found in a church in Germany. This spiral-shaped poem was carved into a church pew in 1510 by a carpenter named Erhart Falckener. The most popular time for shaped poetry came during the Baroque period, when poets began to use the visual form of writing as an important part of their work. This idea had earlier roots in a Jewish art form called Micrography, where small arrangements of text from the Bible were used to create images of natural objects. This method avoided breaking religious rules about making images. Today, Micrography is used by both religious and secular artists, similar to how Arabic text is used in Islamic calligraphy.
In English, early examples of shaped poetry include "Easter Wings" and "The Altar" from George Herbert’s The Temple (1633), and "This crosstree here" by Robert Herrick, shaped like a cross in his Noble Numbers (1647). Other examples include poems shaped like wine flagons by Rabelais and Charles-François Panard (1750), and a goblet-shaped poem by Quirinus Moscherosch (1660). A playful example is "A Toast" by France Prešeren (1844), where stanzas look like wine glasses. Another example is "The Mouse's Tale" by Lewis Carroll (1865), which is shaped like a mouse’s tail.
At the start of the 20th century, shaped poetry returned in works like Calligrammes (1918) by Guillaume Apollinaire, which included poems shaped like a necktie, a fountain, and raindrops. During this time, artists in movements like Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism experimented with how text was arranged, making layout a central part of the art. For example, in Marinetti’s Zang Tumb Tumb (1912), sound poetry was expressed through pictures. In Germany, Raoul Hausmann used special typographic styles in his "Phonemes" to show sounds. In Russia, Vasily Kamensky called his poem Tango with Cows (1914) "ferro-concrete poems," a term later used elsewhere.
Later, some poets moved away from clear meaning by arranging letters of the alphabet in simple ways. For example, Louis Aragon created a sequence from A to Z and called it "Suicide" (1926). Kurt Schwitters reversed the alphabet in his work "ZA (elementary)," and Josep Maria Junoy placed only the letters Z and A at the top and bottom of a page under the title "Ars Poetica."
Post-war concrete poetry
During the early 1950s, two Brazilian artistic groups created very abstract and impersonal work. Poets connected to the São Paulo magazine Noigandres joined them, treating language in a similar abstract way. Their work was called "concrete poetry" after they exhibited with artists in the National Exhibition of Concrete Art (1956/57). The poets included Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari. They were joined in the exhibition by Ferreira Gullar, Ronaldo Azeredo, and Wlademir Dias Pino from Rio de Janeiro. In 1958, a Brazilian concrete poetry manifesto was published, and an anthology appeared in 1962.
Dom Sylvester Houédard said that the 1962 publication of a letter in The Times Literary Supplement by the Portuguese writer E.M. de Melo e Castro helped British writers like himself, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Edwin Morgan discover concrete poetry. By this time, other European writers were also creating similar work. In 1954, the Swedish poet and artist Öyvind Fahlström published the manifesto Hätila Ragulpr på Fåtskliaben. In Germany, Eugen Gomringer published vom vers zur konstellation (from line to constellation), stating that a poem should be "a reality in itself" rather than a description of reality, and "as easy to understand as airport or traffic signs." Houédard noted that a printed concrete poem is "both typographic-poetry and poetic-typography."
Concrete poetry often crosses into other art forms, such as music, sculpture, sound poetry, visual poetry, found poetry, and typewriter art. Henri Chopin’s work focused on the musical qualities of words. Kenelm Cox (1927–68), a kinetic artist, studied how visual experiences change over time, using machines that moved to show this. Ian Hamilton Finlay’s work began on paper but later moved toward three-dimensional art and site-specific sculptures, such as his garden at Little Sparta. The Italian Maurizio Nannucci’s Dattilogrammi experiments (1964/1965) were a transition to his later work in light art.
Bob Cobbing, also a sound poet, used typewriters and duplicators since 1942 to explore how words can be physically represented. He said, "One can understand a poem using the typewriter’s precise movements, but stencils and duplicators let one ‘dance’ to this measure." Houédard’s work was also made mostly on a typewriter but resembled painting and sculpture. Similarly, the American artist Carl Andre, starting around 1958, used visual techniques in his work. In Italy, Adriano Spatola (1941–88) used visual methods to break language into fragments in his Zeroglifico (1965/6).
Edwin Morgan’s experiments with concrete poetry included "found poetry," which he discovered by misreading and isolating parts of printed texts. He said, "Many people have read a newspaper quickly and taken a message different from what was intended. I began looking for these hidden messages, especially when the visual or typographical elements were part of the point." Another example is A Humument, the lifelong work of artist Tom Phillips, who used painting and decoration to highlight unintended meanings on the page.
Although concrete poetry overlaps with many art forms, it fits into a long visual tradition that focuses on how words and spaces between words are arranged on a page to emphasize their meaning. Recently, Mario Petrucci suggested that extreme examples of concrete poetry are part of a larger concept called "Spatial Form." This idea includes how poetry can be distinguished from prose by its visual appearance, as well as how typefaces, repeated letters, and the layout of a poem contribute to its meaning.