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