ABC of Reading

ABC of Reading is a book by Ezra Pound published in 1934. In it, Pound sets out an approach by which one may come to appreciate and understand literature (focusing primarily on poetry). Despite its title the text can be considered as a guide to writing poetry. The work begins with the "Parable of the sunfish", ends with a collection of English poetry that Pound called Exhibits and along the way contains several strikingly informative mantras:

  1. phanopoeia – throwing the object (fixed or moving) on to the visual imagination.
  2. melopoeia – inducing emotional correlations by sound and rhythm of the speech.
  3. logopoeia – inducing 1 & 2 by stimulating associations with other word/word groups.

Online resource



This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Thursday, March 31, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.