Concrete', '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.
Concrete', '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.
Introduction 1. The Double Pattern 2. The Silent Poem 3. Critical Antipathy 4. The Poet as Visual Artist 5. The Bifurcation of Modernist Poetics 6. Poems as Pictures 7. The Sliding Scale 8. After Modernism 9. Conclusion Bibliography Index
Richard Bradford argues that many traditional poets treat words as visual artefacts and that some poems demand to be interpreted like pictures.
Richard Bradford is Research Professor of English at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland. He has previously held posts in Oxford, University of Wales and Trinity College, Dublin. He has published widely on prosody, 18th century criticism, Milton, Jakobsen, Critical Theory, the history of English poetry and contemporary fiction.
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