Editing Poetry analysis (section)

===Visual and concrete poetry===
{{Unreferenced section|date=April 2016}}
Poets such as [[E. E. Cummings]] experiment with punctuation and the words' layout on a page. In doing so, they venture into a realm of poetry that really cannot be read aloud: it can only be experienced through the eye.

:l(a

:le
:af
:fa

:ll

:s)
:one
:l

:iness

Cummings has fractured language into its most atomic elements. To analyze the poem, the reader must first reassemble these into meaningful units: a brief, evocative image—"a leaf falls"—appearing, like an unbidden thought, in the middle of a word, "loneliness". A single falling leaf is by itself a fine image for the feeling of loneliness, but in order to fully experience the poem, the reader must then put the elements of language back into the visual form in which Cummings arranged them: a vertical line (like a leaf falling to the ground), followed by a horizontal series of letters (like a leaf laying flat on the ground). The vertical line is dominated by the word "one" (an absolutely appropriate expression of loneliness) and by the letter "l" (which, on the page, looks like the numeral 1... it looks like "one").<ref>{{Cite web |last=Corfman |first=Allisa |date=2016-11-06 |title=l(a (A Leaf Falls with Loneliness) by E.E. Cummings |url=https://poemanalysis.com/ee-cummings/a-leaf-falls-with-loneliness/ |access-date=2024-02-25 |website=Poem Analysis |language=en-US}}</ref>

Numerous other poets, including [[George Herbert]], [[Lewis Carroll]], [[William Blake]], [[Wyndham Lewis]], and [[John Hollander]] have used the layout of words, letters, and images on the page to create effect in their poems. An analytic reader of poetry must attend to the eye as well as the ear and the mind.