Logopoeia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In literary analysis, logopoeia or logopeia refers to the verbal impact of poetic language.

Ezra Pound coined the word in 1917 from Greek roots in a review of the poetry of Mina Loy — he defined the term as "a dance of the intelligence among words and ideas". In 1929, in the New York Herald Tribune of 20 January, he gave a less opaque definition: that 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".

Pound came to contrast logopoeia, the phenomenon of exclusively verbal context, with two other effects of poetry:

• phanopoeia, the suggesting of visuality
• melopoeia, the suggesting of musicality and rhythm