The Poetics of Typography

Chair: Professor Matthew Campbell

 

Why did poetry become a visual art? Why did verse begin to appeal to the eye rather than the ear? Why do the pages of Victorian poetry look so different to those of twentieth-century verse? Exploiting the expressive possibilities of print — from spacing and indentation to alignment and typeface — is one of the defining ways in which poetry was modernised in the twentieth century. While the experimental mise-en-page of European poets, from the French writers Stéphane Mallarmé and Guillaume Apollinaire to Filippo Marinetti and the Italian Futurists, has been well documented, the no less important typographical explorations of poets writing in English, such as Ezra Pound, Hope Mirrlees, David Jones, and William Carlos Williams, have been largely neglected. This paper will explore an unanswered question in modernist, post-war, and contemporary literature: namely, why did British and American poets, from as early as 1910 right up to the present day, choose to experiment with the design and lay-out of the printed page? 

 

Daniel Matore read for a BA and MPhil at the University of Cambridge from 2008-2012, where he won the Rylands Prize, before working as lecteur d'anglais at the École normale supérieure de Lyon. In 2015/16 he was Joan Nordell Fellow at the Houghton Library, Harvard University. He was awarded a DPhil by the University of Oxford in 2017 and was Leverhulme Early-Career Research Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London from 2018 to 2021. He was appointed to a lectureship in York in 2021 and has articles published or forthcoming in Textual Practice, Modernism/modernity and Comparative Literature. His first book The Graphics of Verse: Experimental Typography in Twentieth-Century Poetry will be published by Oxford University Press in the coming months.