The ideogram changed the course of modern American poetry, and Ideogram
is the first history of this important poetic tradition. In modern
poetry the ideogram is an idea presented to the reader by means of the
juxtaposition of concrete particulars, usually without connective words
or phrases. The poem is therefore presented in precise images, usually
very tersely, and free from conventional form and meter. The idea of
presenting a concept in this manner derives in part from Ernest
Fenollosa's essay "The Chinese Character as a Medium for Poetry," the
Chinese written character itself being a juxtaposition of pictographs to
form a new meaning. Ezra Pound's search for an alternative to
traditional forms of verse composition resulted in his use of the
ideogrammic method which, Laszlo K. Géfin asserts, became the major mode
of presentation in twentieth-century American poetry. Two generations of
avant-garde, experimental poets since Pound have turned to it for
inspiration, evolving their own methods from its principles. Géfin
begins by tracing the development of Pound's poetics from the
pre-Imagist stage through Imagism and Vorticism to the formulation of
the ideogrammic method. He then examines the Objectivist poetics of
Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, and George Oppen; the contributions
to the ideogrammic tradition of William Carlos Williams; and the
Projectivist theories of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Robert
Creeley. He concludes with an exploration of Allen Ginsberg's theory of
the ellipse and Gary Snyder's "riprap" method. Throughout, Géfin
maintains that the ideogrammic mode is the literary representation of
the twentieth-century post-logical-even post-humanist-world view.
