Ezra Pound distinguished three aspects of
poetry
Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings i ...
: melopoeia, phanopoeia, and logopoeia.
Melopoeia
Melopoeia or melopeia is when words are "charged" beyond their normal meaning with some musical property which further directs its meaning,
inducing emotional correlations by sound and rhythm of the speech.
Melopoeia can be "appreciated by a foreigner with a sensitive ear" but does not
translate
Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. The English language draws a terminological distinction (which does not exist in every language) between ''transl ...
well, according to Pound.
Phanopoeia
Phanopoeia or phanopeia is defined as "a casting of images upon the visual
imagination,"
throwing the object (fixed or moving) on to the visual imagination. In the first publication of these three types, Pound refers to phanopoeia as "imagism."
Phanopoeia can be translated without much difficulty, according to Pound.
Logopoeia
Logopoeia or logopeia is defined by Pound as poetry that uses words for more than just their direct meaning,
stimulating the visual imagination with phanopoeia and inducing emotional correlations with melopoeia.
Pound was said to have coined the word from
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
roots in a 1918 review of the "Others" poetry anthology — he defined the term as "the dance of the intellect among words."
Elsewhere he changes intellect to intelligence. In the ''
New York Herald Tribune'' of 20 January 1929, he gave a less opaque definition: poetry which "employs words not only for their direct meaning, but
..takes count in a special way of habits of usage, of the context we expect to find with the word".
But, while this may represent the origin of the term's usage in modern English, the word "logopoeia" itself was not coined by Pound; it already existed in classical Greek.
Logopoeia is the most recent kind of poetry and does not translate well, according to Pound, though he also claimed it was abundant in the poetry of
Sextus Propertius
Sextus Propertius was a Latin elegiac poet of the Augustan age. He was born around 50–45 BC in Assisium and died shortly after 15 BC.
Propertius' surviving work comprises four books of ''Elegies'' ('). He was a friend of the poets Gallus a ...
(c.50BC-15BC).
[Pound, Ezra. ABC of Reading. George Roudedge Limited, 1934. p. 38.]
References
Literary concepts
Ezra Pound
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