logopoeia

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.

Why this word is great

LOGOPOEIA — [Noun] Ezra Pound’s term for poetry that engages the intellect through the associative and contextual dimensions of words, rather than their mere denotation. Coined from Ancient Greek λόγος (lógos, "speech, discourse, word") and ποίησις (poíēsis, "making"), it is the art of linguistic alchemy, where meaning is conjured from the shadows of connotation. Unlike "phanopoeia" (which paints pictures in the mind) or "melopoeia" (which sings to the ear), logopoeia is a dance of wit and implication, a game of echoes played in the labyrinth of language. It is the sly double entendre in a courtier’s compliment, the layered irony of a modernist fragment, or the way a single word—say, "autumn"—can carry the weight of decay, harvest, and nostalgia all at once. The mind, not the senses, is the true audience here.

noun

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.“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 h”