From The Poetical and Prose Works of Henry Kirke White, 1856.

Here's some visual poetry in the wild, from The Intellectual Status of Children Who Are Public Charges, 1915.

Here's a precusor to Suzanne Vega's song "Blood Makes Noise": The Song of the Blood Corpuscles, 1899.

We love finding Ouija boards referenced in old yearbooks.  And check out how they charmingly spelled superstitious:

If

Were you a mystic spirit,
And I a ouija board,
   We'd kick up such a rumpus
   That the mediums would pump us
Of occult news and smear it
On the superstitutious [sic] horde;
Were you a mystic spirit,
And I a ouija board.

From Mansfield State Normal School's Semaphore, 1921.  See also our guide to the Care and Feeding of a Spirit Board.  In the words of the celebrated magician Eugene Burger, "what a lovely and strange book it is!"

See The Care & Feeding of a Spirit Board. 

Here's a precursor to the "Tears in Rain" soliloquy in the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner, from The Sirens Three, written and illustrated by Walter Crane, 1886.

The quest to decode the individual letters in a name goes way, way back.  Our research triggered a realization that every name encodes an ancient Egypitan poem.  As the original publication of our findings is freshly out of print, and as it was originally intended exclusively for professional magicians and mentalists, we were inspired to offer a revised and expanded edition containing twice the number of example readings, so that anyone can perform the technique for friends.  No memory or guesswork is required.  You’ll understand the hidden Egyptian meaning of your name instantly, and you’ll be able to dramatically interpret friends’ names.  You don’t have to be a poet or expert on symbolism to shine with our technique.  You’ll simply say aloud what you secretly know the letters to mean.  Here are the details.

Here's what books looked like before the "Me generation."  From 1893.

Here's the night sky as a cosmic peacock's fan, from The Sirens Three, written and illustrated by Walter Crane, 1886.

Writing an ode to immortality, from Death's Doings, illustrated by Richard Dagley, 1827.

We like this as-is scan from the British Library as a visual poem.  The text reads, "were unable to discover to whose memory it."  From An Aide-de-Camp's Recollections of Service in China by Arthur Augustus Thurlow Cunynghame, 1844.

Separated at birth: Concrete pottery and concrete poetry.

Sappho from Comic History of Greece by Charles M. Snyder, 1898.

"On the far side of words there is a poem writing us." —Stein Mehren, Fire & Ice: Nine Poets from Scandinavia and the North

"By some means, however, they got to the sky, / And found the Sun throned in his palace on high."  From Thoughts and Fancies by John Cotton, 1897.

An illustration from Poems by Charles Rosher (1897).

From Jonathan Caws-Elwitt:

There was a precocious young zebra,
Who was second to none in cerebra.
She read Plato, con brio,
With Venus in Leo,
And Leibniz when Mars was in Libra.

I dreamed of snowflakes and kisses under the mistletoe.

Hungry, pitiless, murderous sea!
Oh, what wild shrieks hath terror sent o'er thee!
    How many millions, dead,
    Lie waiting in thy oozy bed,
Till the last trumpet sound, and Death no more
Shall revel 'mid thy rage and maddening roar!
—Nicholas Michell, "Ocean's Changes" (1867)

The conclusion of the "hermit's" fragments, from Punch, 1842.