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 r |