Pattern poetry

Scope note

Genre of pre-20th century poetry, in which letters, words, or lines are arranged on the page to form a shape or image, usually related to the meaning of the words. For 20th-century works of poetry, particularly of the concrete poetry movement of the 1950s and 1960s, in which language elements are freely arranged, not necessarily in linear syntax, and meaning is derived from the spatial, pictorial, and typographic characteristics of the work, as well as from the sense of the words, use "concrete poetry."