Often deemed unworthy of scholarly attention due to its obscure hybridism and the intrinsically transgressive nature of its practices, twentieth-century Italian Visual Poetry (

) 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’

to Apollinaire’s

, and from the theory of Horace’s

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, limited no longer to pictorial visuality, break all the established barriers of classic forms of words’…

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Citation: Colucci, Dalila. "Twentieth-century Italian Visual Poetry". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 28 December 2018 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=19534, accessed 23 November 2024.]

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