Visual poetry is literary verse written on the page with intentional form to add meaning to the poem. The form may take on a recognizable shape, or may use a free formed pattern to create a new rhythm when reading the poem out loud. These shapes and rhythms are typically tied to the central ideas and themes contained within the poems, and often serve to reinforce those concepts.
Visual poetry is poetry or art in which the visual arrangement of text, images and symbols is important in conveying the intended effect of the work. Confusingly, it is sometimes referred to as concrete poetry, a term that predates visual poetry.

When I Was a Baby
When I was a baby
I cried spreading my voice through the house, beckoning for a response.
When I cried
My blue pajamas wiggled, squirmed and turned against the rails of the crib prison
When I was a baby, my small hands grasped the air as I inhaled, gathering one more breath to cry out for a meal and a cuddle
When my tones reached through the air to my parents they would finally wake
When I cried, they'd come to me
I'd stop crying, look innocently upward and smile as I was lifted into caring arms
When I was a baby

Visual poetry uses the page as a canvas to visually represent the themes, subjects, or sentiments of words in a variety of shapes and forms.
The beauty of the visual format lies in the poet’s ability to mark, prescribe, or record process; the replication of shape; or the simulation of movement. It can also present the material in a way that leads to other meanings or implications that aren’t reflected in the words themselves. As Johanna Drucker notes in her book, Figuring the Word, the page serves "as a vocal score of tone or personality."

Poems take form on the printed page.
Examples of experimental and visual poetry forms are as widespread and boundless as the category suggests. This selection of examples showcases the visual form that poetry can take on the printed page, while acknowledging the equally relevant and perhaps more visually exciting colored manuscript pages, mixed-media forms, broadsides, posters, artists’ books, and poetic sketchbooks that also inform experimental poetry.
Altar poetry.
While altar and pattern poetry found several practitioners in ancient cultures, such as Persia and Greece, they didn’t appear again in the Western world until the 16th century, when English, French, and German Renaissance poets started writing and printing their poems to specific shapes and patterns. Below is an example of an altar form from the latter Renaissance’s premier practitioner of the form, George Herbert. The shape replicates a wing – classic altar poetry. From Easter Wings
George Herbert (1593-1633)Lord, who createdest man in wealth and store,Though foolishly he lost the same,
Decaying more and more,
Till he became
Most poore:
With thee
O let me rise
As larks, harmoniously,
And sing this day thy victories,
Then shall the fall further the flight in me. | |
Geometric representations.
Closely related to the altar poem, but more concerned with actual replication of poetic moment, was the pattern poem, also referred to as the shape poem. While altar poems were written more widely during the Renaissance, the pattern poem made it into the 20th century, thanks to e.e. cummings and Dylan Thomas. One pattern poem from each author is displayed below. Note the geometric representation of two praying hands. O sweet spontaneous earth
e.e. cummings (1894-1962)O sweet spontaneous earth how often have the doting fingers of prurient philosophers pinched and poked thee , has the naughty thumb of science prodded thy beauty, how often have religions taken thee upon their scraggy knees squeezing and buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive gods (but true to the incomparable couch of death thy rhythmic loverthou answerestthem only withspring) | From Vision and Prayer
Dylan Thomas (1914-53)Who
Are you
Who is born
In the next room
So loud to my own
That I can hear the womb
Opening and the dark run
Over the ghost and the dropped son
Behind the wall thin as a wren’s bone?
In the birth bloody room unknown
To the burn and turn of time
And the heart print of man
Bows no baptism
But dark alone
Blessing on
The wild
Child. |
Infinite variations.
Concrete poetry exploded into popularity between the 1920s and 1950s, with large movements forming in Germany, Brazil, and France. Two of the greatest practitioners were Max Bill and Bolivian-born Swiss poet Eugen Gomringer, who defined many variations of concrete poetry, wrote definitive texts and papers, and produced powerful pieces striking in their paucity of words, such as Gomringer’s famous "Silencio." Silencio
Eugen Gomringer (1925– )silencio silencio silenciosilencio silencio silenciosilencio silencio silenciosilencio silencio silenciosilencio silencio silencio | |
One of concrete poetry’s many variations, acrostic verse, keys on the first letters of each line. When spelled vertically, they both title and describe the poem: Uplifting
Robert Yehling (1959- )Upon a glade of sun-sculptedPine forest, rooted in stone,
Layers of my bark peel away,
Inviting a softer surface to emerge. I climb
Far into the sky, following an eagle’s current
To the sun–
I melt into my sculptor...
Nestled by Her vision, I hear a new call:
"Go back to seed, and I will bring you Home." |

When I Was One-and-Twenty
BY A. E. HOUSMAN
When I was one-and-twenty I heard a wise man say,
“Give crowns and pounds and guineas But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies But keep your fancy free.”
But I was one-and-twenty, No use to talk to me.

When I was one-and-twenty I heard him say again,
“The heart out of the bosom Was never given in vain;
’Tis paid with sighs a plenty And sold for endless rue.”
And I am two-and-twenty, And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.