Type your words, pick a shape, and watch your text arrange itself into a picture. Then copy the poem or download it as an image. Your words are repeated to fill the whole silhouette, so any length works.
Your words are repeated to fill the whole silhouette, so any length works. Use Solid for the crispest shape or Keep words to keep your text readable.
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A concrete poem — also called a shape or pattern poem — is one where the visual arrangement of the words on the page is part of the poem's meaning. The text is laid out to form a picture of what it describes, so the reader sees the subject before reading a single line. This maker flows your own words into a chosen silhouette so you can make one instantly, then tweak the words, the shape and the size.
Two fill modes trade legibility against the crispness of the outline. Solid collapses every space so a letter lands in each filled cell — the shape reads at maximum density and looks most like a picture. Keep words preserves your spaces, so the words stay readable as words at the cost of a slightly looser silhouette. Larger text sizes make bold shapes; smaller sizes fit more of your poem into the outline. Everything renders live as you type, and nothing you enter leaves your browser.
The form is centuries old. A few of the best-known examples to read for inspiration:
George Herbert · 1633
Two stanzas printed sideways so the lines taper and swell into a pair of angel wings.
George Herbert · 1633
Lines of varying length build the outline of a stone altar on the page.
Lewis Carroll · 1865
In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland the verse curls down the page in the shape of a mouse's long tail.
Guillaume Apollinaire · 1918
Poems whose words are arranged as pictures — the Eiffel Tower, falling rain, a dove.
E. E. Cummings · 1958
A single falling leaf rendered as one thin vertical column of letters ("a leaf falls / loneliness").
John Hollander · 1969
From Types of Shape — the lines form a swan above the water with its own reflection mirrored below.
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