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Graphic Poetics. Poetry As Visual Art.

This nine chapter monograph devises an unprecedented interpretive method (involving linguistics, textual and theoretical criticism and aesthetic theory) to deal with a previously unacknowledged practice in the work of poets as diverse as Milton, Wordsworth, William Carlos Williams, Charles Tomlinson and Philip Larkin (among many others) where words on the page operate as material signs to sometimes supplement, sometimes override, their referential function. It shows how this ahistorical tendency was first identified by 18th century critics, largely out of print, (preliminary research took place in the Bodleian) who themselves anticipate Davie, Ricks, Hollander, Jakobson, Fish, Wollheim and Derrida and others.