The 9th International Conference on English Language Teaching (ELT) In China (ELT2020)

Visual poetry is poetry in which the typographical arrangement of words is as important in conveying the intended effect as the conventional elements of the poem, such as meaning of words, rhythm, and rhyme. Visual poetry uses the page as a canvas to visually represent the themes, subjects, or sentiments of words in a variety of shapes and forms, so it is also called concrete or shape poetry. However, the previous study places emphasis on the particular techniques of grammatical, lexical and graphological deviations designed by poets, through which their works produce strong visual impression upon the reader, and fails to discuss in detail how visual design contributes to text coherence and complexity, and thus enhances sentiments embodied in poems. Hence, taking E.E. Cummings’ “l(a” and R. Draper’s “Target Practice” as examples, this paper follows a model of multimodal approach to the interpretation of visual poems based upon the theory of systemic functional linguistics and the theory of visual grammar, following a procedure of multimodal decomposition, mono-modal meaning construction, and multimodal meaning integration. The aim of the study is to explore a systematic way of interpreting visual poems and to demonstrate multimodal resources for poetry in print.
 

multimodal discourse analysis; visual grammar; visual poems