At 6:21 AM -0400 6/12/00, Burt Hatlen wrote:
>[log in to unmask] writes:

<snip>

>What strikes me here is Wei's total failure, even in this posting, to
>talk about Pound's WORDS. In fact, he seems to find incomprehensible
>the notion that language is, not simply a vehicle for ideas, but a
>material fact in its own right, a plastic material that the poet molds
>into shapes, no less than the sculptor frees the music inside the
>stone, or the composer shapes a melodic line. But if language is the
>material in which the poet composes, then the decision whether to write
>a poem or to write a letter or a radio broadcast is a matter of some
>consequences.  (Philip Sidney got the issue in a nutshell more than 400
>years ago. "The poet he nothing affirmith"--whereas the writer of a
>radio broadcast is, by the nature of the medium, "affirming" a set of
>ideas.)
>
>As far as I can tell, it is the materiality of language that fascinates
>poets. That's why they worry about such matters as rhyme and meter--or,
>in Pound's case, "absolute rhythm," or the "image," or the "vortex"--or
>melopoeia, phanopoeia, and logopoeia. (These are NOT, by the way, three
>kinds of poetry, as someone on this list said not long ago, but three
>qualities present, in varying proportions, in all poetry.) Pound
>defines "logopoeia" as the "play of ideas."  So that even when we're
>talking about Pound's "ideas," it seems we should recognize that he's
>interested in the PLAY of ideas.
>
>Burt Hatlen

Thanks to Burt Hatlen for an injection of sensible thought into what
is fast becoming a tedious debate. A slight correction, but one that
only emphasizes his point, the classic definition of logopoeia (or at
least the one I remember)  is "the dance of the intellect among
words" (ABC of Reading).

Cheers,
  Bill Cole



--

William Cole, Assistant Director
Computers in Composition and Literature
Department of English
The Ohio State University
464 Denney Hall
164 W. 17th Avenue
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phone: 614-292-4640
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