Extract

At first glance, this incisive and well-written book seems to promise more than it actually delivers. Anyone expecting a wide-ranging discussion of typographical poetry will be surprised to discover that it focuses on just three poets: Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings and Charles Olson. Only one of these can properly be called a typographical poet, moreover, while the other two demonstrate little interest in verbo-visual hijinks. Nevertheless, as the Oxford English Dictionary points out, typography refers not just to the letters’ appearance but also to the page’s ‘layout, and the use of white space’. The author casts a wide net accordingly, one that encompasses poetry by the individuals in question and by modern poets in general. How, he asks, does the appearance of twentieth-century poetry differ from that of the previous century? Why do modern poems look different, what does this mean and why does it matter? As he demonstrates in impressive detail, many, if not most, twentieth-century poets consider typography to be ‘a part of versification’ (p. xii).

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