logopoeia

English

Etymology

Coined by Ezra Pound from Ancient Greek λόγος (lógos, “speech, discourse, story, study, word, reason”) and Ancient Greek ποίησις (poíēsis, “poetry”) in a 1918 review of the Others poetry anthology.

Noun

logopoeia (uncountable)

1. One of Ezra Pound's three kinds of poetry, consisting of the use of words for more than their denotation, taking advantage of the context associated with a word.
   • 1931, Ezra Pound, How to Read:

     Unless I am right in discovering logopoeia in Propertius (which means unless the academic teaching of Latin displays crass insensitivity as it probably does), we must almost say that Laforgue invented logopoeia, observing that there had been a very limited range of logopoeia in all satire, and that Heine occasionnally employs something like it together with a dash of bitters, such as can (though he may not have known it) be found in a few verses of Dorset and Rochester.

   • 2002, Lucia Boldrini, Medieval Joyce, →ISBN, page 69:

     In more traditional aesthetic terms one could say that logopoeia is writing which activates the higher faculties of cognition rather than relying on sense experience. Whereas most poetry avails somehow of the plastic arts to enhance or "charge" language with meaning, logopoeia dances intellectually through verbal connotations, clichés, citations, and resonances.

   • 2007, Barbara Folkart, Second Finding: A Poetics of Translation, →ISBN, page 214:

     Clearly, there is a definite overlap between language gaming, thus defined, and, for example, musicality: as I have pointed out earlier, none of the dimensions of this poem— imagery, music, logopoeia—are truly orthogonal to the others.

   • 2011, Phenomenology/Ontopoiesis Retrieving Geo-cosmic Horizons of Antiquity, →ISBN, page 274:

     If one re-reads the passage with this in mind, it becomes clear that the Homage is primarily about the recreation of an aesthetic attitude, which comes very close to logopoeia as understood by Sullivan and Monk in particular.