In this thesis, Hilder provides new concepts and arguments about the genesis of concrete poetry backed up by a serious interpretation and collation of published material. He relies heavily on critical texts in three full length books written in English, Liselotte Gumpel's "Concrete Poetry" from East and West Germany (1976), David Seaman's Concrete Poetry in France (1981) and Caroline Bayard's The New Poetics in Canada and Quebec. All are held by the Sackner Archive.Hilder "argues that the critical gaps in concrete poetry criticism, both contemporaneous and subsequent to the concrete poetry movement, have fallen into (1) the national fallacy: the attempt to read an international movement within a national framework; (2) the ancient fallacy: the attempt to link concrete poetry with visual poetry and word imagery dating back to ancient cultures; (3) the theoretical fallacy: the attempt retrospectively to read onto concrete poetry the post-structuralist theories of language that became popular shortly following the end of the period I have outlined; and (4) the disciplinary fallacy: the hesitancy of critics to allow for the influence of visual art and other developments outside of literary culture in interpreting the poems and manifestos.The national fallacy has persisted in concrete poetry criticism in spite of the fact that the movement had no geographical centre. Unlike earlier twentieth century movements such as dada, Surrealism, or Futurism (or, more recently, Lettrisme), which seemed to nest in major cosmopolitan centres such as New York, Paris, Berlin, Zurich, and Milan, concrete poetry grew out of Bern, Ulm, Darmstadt, Sao Paulo, Stonypath, Bloomington, and Stuttgart. Yet the national approach persists, against Gomringer' s 1956 manifesto:International-supranational. It is a significant characteristic of the existential necessity of concrete poetry that creations such as those brought together in this volume began to appear almost simultaneously in Europe and South America and that the attitude which made the creation and defense of such structures possible manifested itself here as it did there." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.