This thesis examines concrete poetry in England and Scotland from 1962 to 1975.
Through the 1950s-70s, international concrete poetry evolved away from constructivist
influenced, “classical” ideals of minimalism and iconic visual effect towards principles
owing more to Dadaism and Futurism: spontaneity, maximalism, sonority and an
emphasis on intermedial expression. Against this backdrop, using close textual analysis
supported by primary research, I engage with four poets whose work collectively
exemplifies the wide range of values which concrete poetry represented in England and
Scotland during the period in question. A movement away from classical ideals can be
tracked across the oeuvres of Finlay, Morgan, Houédard and Cobbing; but many aspects
of their work cannot be accounted for by this general rubric. Finlay saw concrete poetry
as a means of casting off Scottish literary tradition, but also of embodying an immutable
vision of aesthetic and ethical order, using a marriage of the visual and linguistic to
emphasise links between disparate ideas and things. However, his restless
reconfiguration of poetry’s visual-physical aspects ultimately resulted in a re-separation
of word and image which, together with an increasing historical-mindedness, ended his
attachment to the style. Morgan, by contrast, used concrete poetry to redefine rather
than repel Scottish literary culture, and was a more context-focused poet, using concrete
grammar – whose sonic possibilities he exploited more than Finlay – to depict specific
communicative scenarios, and thus to register ethical and political imperatives, often
reflecting Scottish nationalist ideals. The emphasis on semantics common to Morgan
and Finlay’s work, reflecting relative fidelity to classical principles, is overridden in
Houédard’s concrete poetry, which came to employ a grammar of abstract visual motifs
in which linguistic meaning was subsumed, related as much to apophatic theology as to
classical concrete. For Cobbing too, concrete became a means of evading language, in
his case to access a transcendent realm of “intermedial” poetry equally related to
language’s sonic and visual dimensions, and influenced by various contemporary artforms,
and by counter-cultural ideals. However, Cobbing’s emphasis on performing
poems, and the reintegration of semantics into his work throughout this period, led by
the early 1970s to an alternative poetic ideal of relativity