ArchivesSpace at the University of Iowa

Scope and Contents 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...