Border Blurs

Abstract

This book presents the first in-depth account of the relationship between English and Scottish poets and the international concrete poetry movement of the 1950s-70s. Concrete poetry was a literary and artistic style which reactivated early-twentieth-century modernist impulses towards the merging of artistic media while simultaneously speaking to a gamut of contemporary contexts, from post-1945 social reconstruction to cybernetics, mass media, and the sixties counter-culture. The terms of its development in England and Scotland also suggest new ways of mapping ongoing complexities in the relationship between those two national cultures, and of tracing broader sociological and cultural trends in Britain during the 1960s-70s. Focusing especially on the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Edwin Morgan, Dom Sylvester Houédard, and Bob Cobbing, Border Blurs is based on new and extensive archival and primary research. It fills a gap in contemporary understandings of a significant literary and artistic genre which has been largely overlooked by literary critics. It also sheds new light on the development of British and Scottish literature during the late twentieth century, on the emergence of intermedia art, and on the development of modernism beyond its early-twentieth-century, urban Western networks.