This article presents some aspects of a research program devoted to scientific poetry in 19th century France. Here, data visualizations are used to better understand the dynamics of a literary genre and, more specifically, to test different ways of plotting its history, by comparing the insights that global visualizations shed on its transformations with the representations that various critics of the time proposed of the same process. The analysis focuses on four variables: the publication figures, the authors’ sociology, their thematic and formal choices.