The article is devoted to the visualization of the poetic text and modern visual poetry. Formal-graphic transformations of the text are considered in a diachronic and synchronic key. It is noted that the use of visualization techniques in verse speech was observed even in the time of the ancient Greek poets.However, visual poetry as a separate type of poetic art had taken shape in the second half of the 20th century. Special attention is paid to the methods of visualization of the text, which were used by the most famous contemporary visual poets of Russia.