Avant-propos à une recherche sur la poésie visuelle Des mythes et des formes.

Dealing with the history of literary forms in European literature, the paper investigates the way cultural traditions forged them (by discussing what forms are interpreted as "poems", starting with a peculiar testimony from the Enneide) and how misreadings often perpetuated them; the paper focuses on the case of visual poetry, which is traditionally established in Horatio's poetics, and aims at proving that there is no objective way of establishing literary species, that they are the result of historically limited cultural conventions and interpretations. Furthermore, written forms of poetry are to be understood as imagining, in a visual system, the sonority of spoken language - again, with no objective guide for a so called transcription of voice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]