The Ideogrammic Method was a technique expounded by Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

 which allowed poetry

Poetry

Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...

 to deal with abstract content through concrete images. The idea was based on Pound's reading of the work of Ernest Fenollosa

Ernest Fenollosa

Ernest Francisco Fenollosa was an American professor of philosophy and political economy at Tokyo Imperial University...

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Pound gives a brief account of it in his book The ABC of Reading (1934). 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:

ROSE	CHERRY
IRON RUST	FLAMINGO

This was a key idea in the development of Imagism

Imagism

Imagism was a movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. The Imagists rejected the sentiment and discursiveness typical of much Romantic and Victorian poetry. This was in contrast to their contemporaries, the Georgian poets,...

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