Examines how eighteenth-century critics treated the visual format of traditional verse as a determinant in readers' appreciation of form and meaning. Explores correspondences between eighteenth-century work and modern criticism. Argues that twentieth-century appreciations of the visual format of verse are limited by their concentration upon more…

Explores the tenets of both the New Criticism and reader response criticism, and concludes that there is a need for a new imperative in criticism that conceives literary understanding in terms of a communication process in which both text and reader are granted importance. (FL)

Examines how literary criticism exploits and marginalizes the poem as printed artifact. Argues that the author-centered, phonocentric premise of close reading neutralizes spatial dynamics and reduces material identity to the status of a transparent medium. Suggests that appreciation of silent visual form is a convention of post modernist writing.…