What is visual poetry? A complete guide to the form (with examples)
Quick answer: Visual poetry is poetry where the shape of the words on the page carries meaning, not just the words themselves. Concrete poetry is one specific movement within it, and shape poetry is one technique within that. If you only remember one thing from this article, remember that — it clears up most of the confusion around the term before it even starts.
Now here’s why that definition actually matters, not just as trivia.
Open Lewis Carroll’s “mouse’s tale” from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and something strange happens before you even read a word. The text is set in one long, thinning column, running down the page — the shape of a tail. Carroll wrote it in 1865, and it’s still one of the clearest examples of what makes visual poetry different from every other kind of poem: the shape isn’t decoration sitting next to the words. The shape is part of what the poem means. Cover the shape up and the poem loses something real, not just something pretty.
That’s the trick people miss, and it’s also where most explanations of this topic go wrong — they use “visual poetry,” “concrete poetry,” and “shape poetry” as if they’re the same thing. They’re not, and once you see how they actually relate to each other, everything else about the topic gets easier.
So what’s the actual difference?
Visual poetry is poetry where how the text looks on the page matters as much as what it says. The typography, the spacing, the shape the words form — all of that is doing real work, the same way rhyme or meter does in a traditional poem.
Here’s the distinction that most explanations skip over, and it’s the one that actually matters:
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Visual poetry | The broadest term — any poem where visual arrangement is essential to meaning, from historical shape poems to digital, image-based vispo |
| Concrete poetry | A specific 20th-century movement (1950s–60s) within visual poetry, where words become physical, sculptural objects on the page |
| Shape poetry | A poem whose outline mimics its subject (a poem about a tail shaped like a tail) — one particular technique within visual poetry |
So concrete poetry and shape poetry are both inside visual poetry, not separate categories sitting next to it. A shape poem is almost always a visual poem. A visual poem isn’t always a shape poem — plenty of visual poetry doesn’t try to look like its subject at all, it just uses layout and typography in some meaningful way.
One more distinction people get wrong constantly: visual poetry is not the same as an illustrated poem. If a poem has a drawing next to it, that’s two separate things sitting side by side — a text and a picture. In visual poetry, you can’t pull the “picture” away from the words, because the words are the picture. Try to separate them and the poem stops working.
Where this actually comes from
Most articles on this topic jump straight to Apollinaire in 1918 and skip everything before it, which honestly leaves out the more interesting part of the story.
English poetry got here first, by accident, centuries before anyone called it a movement. Lewis Carroll’s famous “mouse’s tale” in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) is one of the earliest well-known English examples — the poem’s text is set in a long, thinning column that’s literally shaped like a tail, and the joke depends entirely on seeing that shape. It’s a small, playful piece, but it shows the same idea 20th-century concrete poets would later treat as a serious artistic principle: that a poem’s shape can carry meaning a straight column of text can’t.
Then Apollinaire turned it into something deliberate. In 1918, French poet Guillaume Apollinaire published Calligrammes, a collection where poems are arranged into images — a fountain made of falling lines, rain drawn diagonally down the page in text. This is usually treated as the real starting point of visual poetry as a self-aware artistic choice, rather than a one-off trick individual poets stumbled onto.
By the 1950s, it became a movement with a name. Concrete poetry emerged more or less simultaneously in Brazil and Europe. In Brazil, the Noigandres group — brothers Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, along with Décio Pignatari — argued that a word’s shape and sound could mean something on their own, separate from grammar and sentence structure. In Europe, Swiss-Bolivian poet Eugen Gomringer was pushing a more stripped-down, minimalist version of the same idea. Both were reacting against the same thing: the assumption that a poem’s meaning lives only in its syntax.
And now it lives on screens too. Since the 2000s, visual poetry has mostly moved into digital space — poets working with animation, code, and interactive text instead of ink on paper. The underlying idea hasn’t changed at all. Only the canvas has.
The women who built this movement — and got left out of the story
If you read most surveys of concrete and visual poetry, the same handful of male names come up: Apollinaire, Gomringer, the de Campos brothers. That’s not because women weren’t doing the work. It’s because the way this history usually gets told skips right past them.
Mary Ellen Solt is the clearest example of this gap. She was one of the only American poets — and one of the only women anywhere — at the actual center of the international concrete poetry movement in the 1960s. Her best-known work, Flowers in Concrete (1966), is a series of poems shaped like forsythia, lilac, and geranium, where the typography itself does what a botanical illustration would do. But her bigger contribution might be Concrete Poetry: A World View (1968), the anthology she edited that’s still considered one of the two defining collections of the entire movement. She wasn’t just writing concrete poems — she was one of the people who decided which poems from around the world got remembered as concrete poetry in the first place. That’s an editorial and historical role, not just a creative one, and it’s usually the first thing left out when people summarize her career.
Susan Howe took the form somewhere stranger. Her pages often look interrupted — text turned sideways, overlapping, broken mid-word — and she uses that visual chaos deliberately, usually alongside archival and historical material. The disorder on the page mirrors the actual gaps and erasures in historical record, especially around voices that official history left out. It’s a much harder style to describe than Solt’s flower poems, because the point isn’t clarity — it’s making the reader feel the absence of something.
Amaranth Borsuk represents where the form went once it hit the internet. Her book Between Page and Screen, made with Brad Bouse, uses augmented reality — you hold a printed marker up to a webcam, and an animated poem appears on the screen that isn’t in the book and isn’t on the computer alone. It only exists in the combination of both. That’s about as far from Carroll’s hand-set 1865 tail as visual poetry has gotten, and it’s still doing the exact same job: making the form of the poem inseparable from its meaning.
Jessica Smith has spent much of her career as both a practicing visual poet and a critic pushing for exactly this kind of correction — bringing overlooked women in vispo into the same critical conversation as the canonical male names.
Rosaire Appel and Kristin Prevallet show how wide the contemporary range actually is. Appel works in compositions that are barely verbal at all, sitting right at the edge where poetry starts to become drawing. Prevallet moves between elegy, essay, and visual form, often blurring where one ends and the next begins.
How to actually read one of these poems
This is the part most guides skip, and it’s the part beginners actually need. A visual poem asks something different of you than a normal stanza does, and if you read it the way you’d read a regular poem, you’ll miss most of what it’s doing.
Look before you read. Take in the whole shape first, the way you’d look at a photograph before reading its caption. What does the poem look like, before you’ve processed a single word of it?
Pay attention to what’s blank, not just what’s printed. In a visual poem, empty space is a choice, not an absence of content. It can mean silence, distance, something withheld. Skimming past the white space is like skipping every rest in a piece of music.
Stop assuming line breaks are about rhythm. In ordinary poetry, a line break usually has something to do with sound or breath. In visual poetry, a line might break exactly where it does purely because of how it looks on the page — because that’s where the shape narrows, or where the tail thins out.
Notice when the shape and the words disagree with each other. Some visual poems make their shape match their subject in an obvious, satisfying way — a poem about rain that pours down the page. But plenty of the more interesting ones do the opposite on purpose: a chaotic, broken shape describing something calm, or a rigid grid describing something emotional and messy. That contradiction is often the actual point of the poem, not a flaw in it.
A few poems worth actually looking up
Reading about visual poetry only gets you so far — you have to see it. These are a good starting set, roughly in historical order:
- Lewis Carroll, the “mouse’s tale” (1865, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) — a poem shaped like the tail it describes
- Guillaume Apollinaire, Calligrammes (1918) — where the modern form really begins
- Mary Ellen Solt, “Forsythia” — a flower built entirely out of letterforms
- Eugen Gomringer’s early concrete poems — stark, grid-based, almost architectural
- Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse, Between Page and Screen — a contemporary AR poem that only fully exists on a screen
Try writing one yourself
The fastest way to actually understand visual poetry is to write a bad one. Pick a short poem — five lines is plenty — about any object or feeling. Then rewrite it, keeping the same words, but rearrange them on the page so the shape itself reflects the subject. Don’t worry about it being good. Notice what changes: what happens to a poem when it doesn’t just describe something anymore, but starts to look like it too.
Where to go deeper
- The Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry — one of the largest collections of this material anywhere, much of it digitized
- UbuWeb — a free, extensive digital archive covering concrete and visual poetry across decades
- Mary Ellen Solt (ed.), Concrete Poetry: A World View (Indiana University Press, 1968) — still the anthology most scholars point to first