SOURCE: "Kurt Schwitters' Contribution to Concrete Art and Poetry," in Forum For Modern Language Studies, Vol. IX, No. 1, January, 1973, pp. 75-85.

In the following essay, Finke considers Schwitters as an early proponent of concrete poetry and discusses his contribution to the visualization of language in writing and art.

"Kurt Schwitters was called the master of collage. He was the master of collage. The heresy of giving a new value to odd and overlooked, downtrodden bits of reality—be they bits of wire or bits of words—by putting them together into some specific kind of relationship and creating thus a new entity, was the essence of Schwitters' art."¹ "Although he always emphasized that form alone was important for him, the mounted and pasted objects produced that suggestive spirit of reality in his 'abstract' art that he was so passionately attached to. Above all, the fragments of words that...