The depth of the surface : Visual iconicity in the graphic art of poetry

This thesis revolves around an obvious fact: printed (or otherwise two- or three-dimensional) poetry is always and inevitably visual. By analysing a representative selection of poems, including conspicuously experimental and image-like poems as well as examples of more conventional poetry, the thesis points out that visual iconicity is an equally inevitable consequence of the visuality of printed poetry. The analysis applies terminology relating to iconicity and intermediality (presented by Lars Elleström, whose theoretical basis is the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce) to the selected poems, while avoiding making too specific interpretations, in order to maintain a discussion of the ever-present phenomenon of visual iconicity as such, and not just the individual examples. Rather than introducing visual iconicity specifically to confirm more or less specific interpretations of poetic texts, this method of approaching poems as two-dimensional works of art is what this paper mainly aims to propose, as a productive starting point for literary analyses in general; as is concluded in the theoretical framework by Elleström, the actual modal and iconic properties of printed poetry contradict mutually exclusive dichotomies such as verbal/visual and text/image. While indirectly visually iconic poems tend to have a wider range of possible interpretations at the outset, the existence of iconic potential, however, does not depend on any specific interpretation