Concrete Poem
Quick answer: A concrete poem makes its visual shape part of its meaning, from George Herbert's Easter Wings to the 1950s concrete poetry movement. Learn how to write one.
In a concrete poem, the way the words sit on the page is not presentation, it is content. The text might form wings, rain, a column collapsing, or an abstract field of repeated words, but in every case the eye reads shape and language together, and the poem means less if you hear it without seeing it.
Poets have played with shaped text for over two thousand years, from Greek pattern poems in the shape of altars and axes to George Herbert's Easter Wings in 1633, printed as two pairs of wings that thin and swell with the poem's argument about falling and rising. The modern movement that gave the form its name arrived in the 1950s and made shape the whole point.
From pattern poems to a movement
The term concrete poetry belongs to the 1950s, when the Noigandres group in Brazil, led by the brothers Augusto and Haroldo de Campos with Decio Pignatari, and the Swiss Bolivian poet Eugen Gomringer, independently began making poems as visual constellations rather than sentences. A joint manifesto followed in the later 1950s. Gomringer's silencio, a grid of the word silence with a blank space at its centre, remains the movement's most famous demonstration: the poem's subject is the hole in it. In Britain, Ian Hamilton Finlay carried concrete poetry into gardens and stone.
What counts as the rules
Concrete poetry has conventions rather than metrics. The governing principle is that visual form and verbal meaning must depend on each other; if the poem survives being retyped as ordinary lines, it was not really concrete.
Two broad families exist, and scholars distinguish them. Shaped or pictorial poems arrange full sentences into an image, Herbert's wings being the ancestor. Classic concrete poems, in the 1950s sense, often abandon syntax altogether, deploying single words, letters and space as compositional material, closer to graphic design than to verse paragraphs.
Making one that works
Begin with the relationship, not the picture. Ask what the shape can say that the words cannot: a poem about a hole should perhaps contain one, a poem about crowding should feel cramped to the eye. Draft the text first in plain lines so the language can stand inspection, then shape it, adjusting wording where the outline demands. Work in a fixed width font or a design tool so spacing holds. Print it; screens lie about spacing. And test the poem on someone who cannot be told what it is shaped like.
Strengths and the standing temptation
Concrete poems are strong on subjects where form is the experience: silence, absence, rain, gravity, bureaucratic grids, bodies. They delight children and stop adults mid scroll, which makes them natural for exhibitions and social sharing. The standing temptation is decoration, pouring an ordinary poem into a cookie cutter outline of a heart or a tree. If the shape merely illustrates a noun the poem already contains, cut the shape or cut the poem. The form rewards writers whose visual idea and verbal idea arrive together.
What poets can take from this
- Ask what the shape adds; if the answer is decoration, rethink.
- Write the language first, shape it second, revise both together.
- Use monospaced fonts or design software so spacing survives.
- Let white space act as silence, absence or breath.
- Print drafts to check that the shape reads at arm's length.
- Study Herbert's Easter Wings and Gomringer's silencio as two poles of the form.
Try it yourself
Write a concrete poem about something disappearing, in which the text itself physically diminishes, thins or empties as the poem proceeds, so the reader watches the loss happen.
Questions
What is a concrete poem?
A poem whose visual arrangement on the page carries part of its meaning. The shape, spacing and typography work with the words, so the poem cannot be fully experienced read aloud alone.
Who started concrete poetry?
Shaped poems go back to ancient Greek pattern poetry and George Herbert's Easter Wings in 1633, but the named movement began in the 1950s with Brazil's Noigandres group, the de Campos brothers and Decio Pignatari, alongside Eugen Gomringer in Switzerland.
What is the difference between concrete and shape poetry?
Shape poetry arranges sentences into a recognisable picture. Concrete poetry in the stricter 1950s sense treats words and letters as visual material, often without normal syntax, and the composition may be abstract rather than pictorial.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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