Picturebooks as Visual-Verbal Poems

ABSTRACT One of the foundations of picturebook studies is that the visual- and verbal-texts together create an integrated experience of the whole text. However, for poetry in picturebooks, the designation of “poem” is traditionally applied only to the verbal-text. In this paper I argue that visual techniques can be more than simply “poetic” and can be part of the structural and technical choices that make a poem. I apply this theoretical discussion to the example of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are concluding that combined visual and verbal techniques create an integrated visual-verbal poem.