PATTERN POETRY

This term is most appropriate in defining poems, usually conventional in syntax, whose typography represents a shape that may be figurative or abstract. The term thus defines lines of poems whose ends suggest, say, the shape of a horse; the epithet defines as well the classic geometric shape poems of the seventeenth-century British poet George Herbert (1593–1633). It differs from Visual Poetry, which is generally nonsyntactical, and Poesia Vivisa, which customarily incorporates photographs along...