Ideogrammic method

The Ideogrammic Method was a technique expounded by Ezra Pound which allowed poetry to deal with abstract content through concrete images. The idea was based on Pound's reading of the work of Ernest Fenollosa, especially The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, composed by Fenollosa but edited by Pound after the author's death, 1908.

Pound gives a brief account of it in his book The ABC of Reading (1934).^[1] He explains his understanding of the way Chinese characters were formed, with the example of the character 'East' (東) being essentially a superposition of the characters for 'tree' (木) and 'sun' (日); that is, a picture of the sun tangled in a tree's branches, suggesting a sunrise (which occurs in the East). He then suggests how, with such a system where concepts are built up from concrete instances, the (abstract) concept of 'red' might be presented by putting together the (concrete) pictures of:

This was a key idea in the development of Imagism.

References

See also

• Ideogram

Ezra Pound
Poems	A Lume Spento Ballad of the Goodly Fere Cathay Hugh Selwyn Mauberley In a Station of the Metro Ripostes The Cantos
Other work	ABC of Reading (Parable of the Sunfish) The Spirit of Romance Le Testament de Villon
Family	Dorothy Shakespear (wife) Omar Pound (son) Mary de Rachewiltz (daughter) Thaddeus C. Pound (grandfather) Olga Rudge William Wadsworth
Miscellaneous	Ezra Pound's Three Kinds of Poetry List of cultural references in The Cantos Des Imagistes Brunnenburg Ideogrammic method Visits to St. Elizabeths The Pound Era A ZBC of Ezra Pound