Concrete Poetry: A World View. Edited and with an introduction by Mary Ellen Solt. Co-edited by Willis Barnstone. Published by Indiana University Press in 1953.
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Concrete poetry is the name given a variety of new formal experiments undertaken by poets in many countries since World War II in response to their perception of the spiritual and linguistic needs of contemporary man. They believe that the concrete poem with its reduced form of language communicates in a way related to the scientific formula. This reduced form has evolved from the very uses of language in the world of advertising and mass media that are conventionally considered to be contributing to the death of poetry.

Mary Ellen Solt, a leading American concrete poet, provides in this volume the first comprehensive survey of the international movement of this art form. She traces the evolution of the concrete poem from the traditional form (the sonnet) through concrete art and the theories of Max Bill in the work of Eugen Gomringer; from innovations made by Mallarme, Apollinaire, Joyce, Pound, and cummings; from musicians and artists such as Webern, Boulez, Stockhausen, Mondrian, Albers, Calder, Bill, and Eisenstein; from linguistics, Gestalt psychology, and cybernetics in the work of Noigandres Group (Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, Decio Pignatari) of Brazil; from a reaction against traditional poetry through abstract painting in the work of Oyvind Fahlstrom, and from Futurism in the work of Carlo Belloli.

Included are discussions and defenses by poets of more recent developments such as Spatialisme as defined by Pierre Garnier of France and of new genres such as type poems, typewriter poems, tape recorder poems, kinetic poems, and object poems. The editor has selected over one hundred thirty concrete poems and texts, many of them in color, giving the reader a widely representative selection of the work being done by concrete poets throughout the world. A section of manifestoes and statements on concrete poetry by Eugen Gomringer, the Noigandres group, Oyvind Fahlstrom, Max Bense, Pierre Garnier, Henri Chopin, Paul de Vree, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Jonathan Williams makes the volume an indispensable source book for the international movement of concrete poetry.

"Western poems have been, through the ages, essentially a discourse. Modern poets, from a symbolism to surrealism (and, in English, among others and mainly cummings and Pound) have made a criticism of poetic discourse within the discourse, within a poem. Concrete poetry breaks it: with it the course stops. This is its great contribution. Temporal poetry brings the reader from one place to another, unexpected place; spatial poetry saves the walk: it presents us suddenly with the point of arrival. Or leaves us at the point of departure."

--Octavio Paz