The Visual Poem in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

"Visual Poetry" is a technique that we normally associate with seventeenth-century pattern verse and with the typographical format of modern free verse and concrete poetry. This essay is an examination of the ways in which eighteenth-century critics treated the visual format of traditional verse as a determinant in the readers’ appreciation of form and meaning. Critics such as John Rice, John Walker and Joshua Steele reprinted sequences of verse in accordance with their ideals of oral delivery, and others such as Thomas Barnes and Peter Walkden Fogg, regarded the silent printed text as productive of effects which could be appreciated only via the interpretive faculty of the eye. The final section explores correspondences between the eighteenth-century work and modern criticism, and goes on to argue that twentieth-century appreciations of the visual format of verse are limited by their concentration upon the more extravagant typographic experiments of free verse.