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Neologistic compounds

A lot of writers and poets used Neologistic compounds. Some Liverpool poets as Adrian Henry (b.1932), Roger McGough (b.1937), and Brian Patten (b.1946) can show Neologistic compounds in their poems.
Joycean lexicoining is but one of the several techniques described in earlier pages available to any author who wishes to neologize. For example, there may be a novel use of affixes:

Altarwise by owl-light in the half-way house

The gentleman lay graveward with his furies;
(Dylan Thomas, “Altarwise by Owl-light”, 1935-6)
Or an unusual word-class conversion:
we slipped thro’ the frenchwindows
and arminarmed across the lawn
(Roger McGough, “The Fish”, 1967)
But innovative compounds are particularly widespread, and deserve special space.
The staid set of compound lexemes which was illustrated before does not even begin to capture the exuberant inventiveness which can be seen in English literature from its earliest days. Old English was dominated by its creative compounding, as seen in such forms as hronrad ‘sea’ (literally, ‘whale-road’), and, much later, Shakespeare made considerable use of Neologistic compounds: pity-pleading eyes and oak-cleaving thunderbolts. Sometimes several items are joined in a compound-like way:

a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited-

hundred-pound, filthy woosted-stocking
knave, a Lilly-livered, action-taking,
whoreson, glasse-gazing super-seruiceable
finicall Rogue
(King Lear, II.ii.15)

It is not a great remove from here to the Joycean juxtapositions of Ulysses, 1922:

a broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed

redhaired freely freckled shaggy-bearded widemouthed
largenosed longheaded deepvoiced barekned
brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced sinewyarmed hero.

or to the lexical creations of Gerard Manely Hopkins, mixing hyphenated and solid forms:

This darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down…
A windpuff-bonnet of fawn-froth
Turns and twindles over the broth…
(“Inversnaid”, 1881)

Of course, simply to print a series of words without spaces between them is hardly to create a compound, except at a most superficial level. A real compound acts as a grammatical unit, has a unified stress pattern, and has a meaning which is in some way different from the sum of its parts. Many literary compounds do none of this, and have a solely graphic appeal, as in this later line from Roger McGough’s poem:

Then you took of your other glove
There is perhaps a phonetic implication in such forms, suggestive of a difference in rhythm or speed of utterance when read aloud; but there is no grammatical or semantic change involved. A different kind of point is being made: to break graphic convention for its own sake reinforces the iconoclastic, irreverent tone with which the Liverpool Poets of the 1960s came to be identified.