Often deemed unworthy of scholarly attention due to its obscure hybridism and the intrinsically transgressive nature of its practices, twentieth-century Italian Visual Poetry (Poesia Visuale) is a unique field, straddling the boundary between literature and art. The Western tradition of word-image combinations in which this genre is rooted reaches at least from the Alexandrian poets’ carmina figurata to Apollinaire’s Calligrammes, and from the theory of Horace’s Ars Poetica to the most recent “pictorial turn” (Mitchell). It nevertheless stands at a critical historical juncture, when the presence and interchange of increasingly numerous and composite arts and technologies, …
3221 words
Citation: Colucci, Dalila. "Twentieth-century Italian Visual Poetry". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 28 December 2018 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=19534, accessed 21 November 2024.]
