Imagery in Poetry

 

Though often written off as decoration or illustration, imagery lies at the heart of a poem. Much of any language is built of dead metaphors, and metaphors in poetry are more sleeping than dead. To put the matter concisely: imagery is the content of thought where attention is directed to sensory qualities: mental images, figures of speech and embodiments of non-discursive truth.

Discussion

Psychologists identify seven kinds of mental images — those of sight, sound, taste, smell, touch, bodily awareness and muscular tension. All are available to poets, and are used by poets, though rarely to the same extent. The key point is the purposes to which imagery is put. Metaphor, simile, allegory, personification, metonymy (attribute for whole) and synecdoche (part for whole) all involve imagery. Often the things compared are both images, but one of them may also be a feeling or concept. The effects achieved are very various, therefore, and the matter is further complicated by literary fashion and a poet's individual obsessions.

Imagery has adjusted to changing cultural outlooks. The medieval view of art was rooted in morality, and its descriptions of the world never forgot that the smallest thing must also serve God's purposes. The Renaissance writers studied the classical authors, and employed imagery to clarify, enforce and decorate. Imagery was often elaborate, but not generally constitutive of meaning. The growth of a homogeneous reading public in the 18th century brought a polite and plain diction into general use. Images became mental representations of sensory experience, a storehouse of devices by which the original scenes of nature, society, commerce, etc. could be recreated. With Romantic transcendentalism, when the world reappeared as the garment of God, and the abstract and general resided in the concrete and particular, poetry came to embody the sacred, and images to be symbols of an indwelling deity. In Modernism and Postmodernism, the interest has focused on the images themselves, which are an inescapable part of language, and therefore a way of interrogating the world.

Suggestions

 

Consider using imagery to:

1. Externalize thought.

2. Create mood and atmosphere.

3. Give continuity by recurring leitmotifs.

4. Develop plot or increase dramatic effect by abrupt changes in imagery.

5. Exploit the etymology of words to subtly revive their original meanings.

Recommendations

1. Don't mix metaphors too wantonly. Shakespeare did, but fashions change.

2. Find images that are new-struck, resonant and apposite.

3. Avoid imagery altogether rather than employ cliché.

4. Imagery constructs a world: make sure that world is real and vibrant with contemporary issues.

 

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