logos-and-poiema

Every made thing has two characters at once: it means and it is. It says something — states a case, carries an allegiance, stands for an idea — and it is also a thing made, with a shape and a design of its own. C. S. Lewis named the pair for literature in An Experiment in Criticism: the Logos, what the work says, and the Poiema, what it is as a made object. The two can be separated only in thought, and "the better the work is, the more violent the abstraction is felt to be."