IMAGE IN POETRY Image in Poetry Introduction What is an image?

This is a question that philosophers and poets have asked themselves for thousands of years and have yet to definitively answer. The most widely used definition of an image these days is:"...an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time." (Ezra Pound) But this definition from Pound has a history to it. Before Pound outlined his definition, the image was seen very differently by most people. Therefore, the question "what is an image?" immediately breaks down into three fundamental parts: 1) Where do images come from? 2) Once an image is created, what is it? 3) How can an image function in a poem? Before we answer these questions, we'll want to discuss some terms related to image so that we can use them in our answers. Related Terms Imagery The category of which all images, as varied and lively as they are, fall into. "Imagery is best defined as the total sensory suggestion of poetry" (John Ciardi, World Book Dictionary def. of "Imagery.") Imagination 1) The mental laboratory used for the creation of images and new ideas. 2) "n. A warehouse of facts, with poet and liar in joint ownership." (Ambrose Bierce, 60) 3) "Imagination is not, as its etymology would suggest, the faculty of forming images of reality; it is rather the faculty of forming images which go beyond reality, which sing reality." (Gaston Bachelard ,"On Poetic Imagination and Revery," 15) Imagism A school of poetry and poetics made popular by Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) in the early 20th century that focused on "direct treatment of the thing, whether subjective or objective." H.D.'s "Sea Garden" is often seen as a good example of this style.

Concrete detail A detail in a poem that has a basis in something "real" or tangible, not abstract or intellectual, based more in things than in thought. Sensory detail A detail that draws on any of the five senses. This is very often also a concrete detail. Where do images come from? The first question is one best left to psychologists and philosophers of language. Perhaps one of the most complete philosophical inquiries (and the one that seemed to create a dramatic break from classical philosophy), was that of Gaston Bachelard. Bachelard believed that the image originated straight out of human consciousness, from the very heart of being. Whereas before the image was seen merely as a representation of an object in the world, Bachelard believed that the image was its own object and that it could be experienced by a reader who allowed him or herself the opportunity to "dream" the image (the "revery" of reading poetry). The image then could not be intellectualized so much as experienced. He even went so far as to claim that "Intellectual criticism of poetry will never lead to the center of where poetic images are formed." ("Poetic Imagination" 7) He believed that the image erupts from the mind of the poet, that the poet is not entirely in control of the image and therefore is not seen as "causing" the image to come into being. Since the image has no "cause," the image has no past, and, subsequently, is an object in and of itself, separate from its maker and separate from the object it describes. He claims "[The image] becomes a new being in our language, expressing us by making us what it expresses; in other words, it is at once a becoming of expression, and a becoming of our being." Bachelard is, of course, just one person's opinion on the matter, but his philosphy does hold true to the somewhat enigmatic and difficult-to-pin-down nature of the image. Where the image comes from is an issue that will probably never be solved, but suffice to say that if you approach its making as a mystery (and allow it to simply happen without too much intellectualizing) you will at least keep in line with one major aspect of its origin, that of the unknown. Images and Their Uses What is an image? The image is often seen, after it has been written, as being one of two things. It is either something that represents a thing in the "real" world, or it is seen as its own thing, divorced from the burden of representing anything other than itself. Again, it is the latter definition that has come into more common use. As many philosophers have recently shown, written language is more than simply representational. This means that the image, rather than being something that

stands in for something else, is seen as something in and of itself; tied to the things of the world, but not burdened by "representing them directly". Instead of staying in the abstract, let's look at an example of the formation of an image. We'll start with the following phrase: The yellow lemon If image were merely a stand-in for something, then the phrase "The yellow lemon" would be an image. While we can perhaps see a lemon (albeit a redundant "yellow" one,) there is little evidence of a mind at work in this phrase. This particular lemon lacks certain characteristics that would convey that it is being truly experienced by a person, characteristics that more recent poets have defined more accurately. Ezra Pound made perhaps the most widely used definition of image in the 20th century: "An 'Image' is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time." (Pound 143) In Pound's definition, the image is not just a stand in for something else; it is a putting-into-words of the emotional, intellectual and concrete stuff that we experience in any given moment. It is also important to note that an image in poetry, contrary to popular belief, is not simply visual. It can engage any of the senses. And, in fact, for it to be an image, it must engage at least one of the senses by using sensory detail. Take, for example, the following image (we'll build on our previous example): The sunlight in a lemon makes me wince. The words don't simply stand in for an absent object. There is suddenly a full experience in the words. It feels more human. There is something intellectual (one must convert the sunlight into vitamin C in order to know how the sunlight is involved), there is something sensual (taste, sour), and a bit of emotion (probably based on whether the reader, unlike the speaker in the poem, likes lemons). The instant of time is that of the speaker eating the lemon. The moment is frozen, so to speak, and given to the reader every time they read the image. Poet Larry Levis felt this "freezing an instant of time" is what makes the image poignant. He said: The image draws on, comes out of, the "world of the senses" and, therefore, originates in a world that passes, that is passing, every moment. Could it be, then, that every image, as image, has this quality of poignancy and vulnerability since it occurs, and occurs so wholeheartedly, in time? (117)

It is the potential of losing the image that gives it its power. The job of the poet is to freeze the image as well as possible in a way that feels very real and human (concrete, intellectual and emotional). Taste a lemon and the sensation last for only a few seconds; write an image that conveys what it is like to eat a lemon and the sensation lives longer. What are the uses of an image? Once an image is created, there is often a need to place it in the context of a larger poem. While many aspects of an image may be endlessly debatable, this one rarely is: images are the concrete, gut-level part of a poem. And their function within a poem reflects that. The poet Tony Hoagland often speaks about poems having many levels, or chakras, as he calls them. The heady and purely intellectual stuff of a poem he calls the "rhetorical". This is where questions are asked, statements are made and hypotheses are hypothesized. The second level is diction. This is where the voice of the poet comes through and doesn't concern our discussion too much here. The gut level is the image. The image, says Hoagland, comes in to fill the spaces made in the rhetorical moves of the poem. Say the poet states: We find sunlight in the strangest places. Now there is nothing resembling an image here. This statement is purely intellectual, or, in Hoagland's language, "rhetorical". This statement serves to open space in the poem, allowing something more grounded and earthy to come in. Our image from earlier may work after this somehow, or many other images could follow. The amount of space opened by a rhetorical statement or question reflects how much room there is to fill in a poem. A small question or statement may merit a simple, small image. A more grandiose rhetorical movement may call for long lists of images. Walt Whitman's lists are a good example; he posits something and then lists sometimes hundreds of variations on the theme. This way of looking at the placement of an image into a poem is somewhat limiting and by no means exhaustive. The key to using images well in a poem is to remember that images tend to produce gut-level responses in our readers. They feel the most real. They do, ultimately, convey (in very short order) a complete human experience in words. And that is why a study of poetry almost always begins with the image. It is the backbone, the grounding rod, of the poem. Few other aspects of our language can boast such a strength.

Other Definitions Imagery is the name given to the elements in a poem that spark off the senses. Despite "image" being a synonym for "picture", images need not be only visual; any of the five senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell) can respond to what a poet writes. Examples of non-visual imagery can be found in Ken Smith's 'In Praise of Vodka', where he describes the drink as having "the taste of air, of wind on fields, / the wind through the long wet forest", and James Berry's 'Seashell', which puts the "ocean sighs" right in a listener's ear. A poet could simply state, say, "I see a tree", but it is possible to conjure up much more specific images using techniques such as simile ("a tree like a spiky rocket"), metaphor ("a green cloud riding a pole") or synechdoche ("bare, black branches") - each of these suggests a different kind of tree. Techniques, such as these, that can be used to create powerful images are called figurative language, and can also include onomatopoeia, metonymy and personification. One of the great pleasures of poetry is discovering a particularly powerful image; the Imagists of the early 20th century felt it was the most important aspect, so were devoted to finding strong images and presenting them in the clearest language possible. Of course, not every poem is an Imagist poem, but making images is something that nearly every poem in the Archive does. An interesting contrast in imagery can be found by comparing Alison Croggon's 'The Elwood Organic Fruit and Vegetable Shop' with Allen Ginsberg's 'A Supermarket in California'; although both poets seem to like the shops they write about, Ginsberg's shop is full of hard, bright things, corralled into aisles, featuring neon, tins and freezers, while the organic shop is full of images of soft, natural things rubbing against one another in sunlight. Without it being said explicitly, the imagery makes it clear that the supermarket is big, boxy, and tidy, unlike the cosy Elwood's. This is partly done with the visual images that are drawn, and in part with Croggon's images that mix the senses (this is called synaesthesia), such as the strawberries with their "klaxons of sweetness" or the gardens with "wellgroomed scents", having the way the imagery is made correspond with what the imagery shows.

Most figures of speech cast up a picture in your mind. These pictures created or suggested by the poet are called 'images'. To participate fully in the world of poem, we must understand how the poet uses image to convey more than what is actually said or literally meant. We speak of the pictures evoked in a poem as 'imagery'. Imagery refers to the "pictures" which we perceive with our mind's eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin, and through which we experience the "duplicate world" created by poetic language. Imagery evokes the meaning and truth of human experiences not in abstract terms, as in philosophy, but in more perceptible and tangible forms. This is a device by which the poet makes his meaning strong, clear and sure. The poet uses sound words and words of color and touch in addition to figures of speech. As well, concrete details that appeal to the reader's senses are used to build up images. Although most of the image-making words in any language appeal to sight (visual images), there are also images of touch (tactile), sound (auditory), taste (gustatory), and smell (olfactory). The last two terms in parentheses are mainly used by lovers of jargon. An image may also appeal to the reader's sense of motion: a verb like Pope's spring does so. A good poet does not use imagery -- that is, images in general -- merely to decorate a poem. He does not ask Himself, "How can I dress up my subject so that it will seem fancier than it is?" Rather, he asks himself, "How can I make my subject appear to the reader exactly as it appears to me?" Imagery helps him solve his problem, for it enables him to present his subject as it is: as it looks, smells, tastes, feels and sounds. To the reader imagery is equally important: it provides his imagination with something palpable to seize upon. TYPES OF IMAGES (according to the source of visual images) 1. SIMPLE DESCRIPTION - a large number of images which arise in a poem come from simple description of visible objects or actions. 2. DRAMATIC SITUATION 2.1 DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE - as soon as the reader becomes aware that the poem is a dramatic monologue, he visualizes a speaker with the result that the particularity of the situation is evident. 2.2 DIALOGUE - has the same effect as Dramatic Monologue. 3. STORY - like description, narration causes the reader or hearer to form images. When the reader realizes that he is being told a tale he visualizes from habit; he does not wish to miss the point of the story. 4. METONYMY - when a poet uses metonymy, he names one thing when he really means another thing with which the first is closely connected. e.g. Seven little foreheads stared up at me from the first row. (where "foreheads" is used for "eyes" ). 5. SYNECDOCHE - when a poet uses synecdoche, he names a part of a thing when he means whole thing (or vice versa) or the genius for the species.

6. ONOMATOPOEIA - although imagery usually refers to visual images, there are also aural images. The use of words which sound like their meaning is called onomatopoeia. e.g. buzz, hiss, clang , splash, murmur, chatter, etc. As Sir Philip Sidney said: "Imaging is itself the very height and life of poetry." It must be so, form the very nature of poetic vision, which always embodies itself in the form of symbols. The personality of the poet, which is the well-spring of his poetry will be a world created from all that he has known and felt and seen and heard and thought. His image-making poetic faculty and his imagination will blend together his memories and his immediate perceptions into a thousand of varieties of shapes and associations of living loveliness and power. However apparently direct and unadorned the poet makes his verses, he will employ images. However simple his statement he cannot make it abstract. How imagery comes to the poet, how it is carried alive into the heart by passion is too mysterious a process to analyze. It brings us back at once to the problem of creation in general. Under the influence of the creative ferment, the consciousness of the poet seizes association and poetry is the union of the mental and emotional excitement of the experience with imagery which leaps to meet it, and which must be already in the memory of the poet. MEANING IN POETRY Mood The mood is the feeling or atmosphere of a piece. The mood can be many different things. Some examples included: A feeling of love. A feeling of doom. A feeling of fear. A feeling of pride. An atmosphere of chaos. An atomsphere of peace. Meaning What is the author trying to communicate. How to Achieve Mood and Meaning You should be able to establish mood or purpose in poetry by: choice of words, summary terms, symbolic language, structure of the sentences, the length of each poetic line, and the punctuation marks chosen. So to do this, you must first have background knowledge on the subject, or research it.

Dialect A regional way of speaking that is different from the norm. For example, A southerner might say Ya'll while a New Yorker might say Youz Guys. The entire piece can be altered by dialect. If you want to convey a sense of innocence, you might choose the casual dialect of a someone who has not had much schooling. Invented words Poets can invent words.Just look at any Dr. Suess book. His words always convey some meaning and often come with the mood of levity. These words are never just thrown in to fit a place, they add color and clarity to a work. Sensory and figurative language Sensory language is language that appeals to the senses (e.g seeing, hearing, feeling, touching, smelling). Figurative Language are words used for descriptive effect that express some truth behind their literal meaning (eg. similes, metaphors, personification). Sentence structure You could choose long compound sentences to, perhaps, create an air of formality and seriousness. Or maybe you want a more lively piece in which you can choose longer and shorter sentences. Perhaps, instead, you want to create a feeling of confusion, you might chose to use fragments. Line length The length of sentences and stanzas in poems. Again, you can convey mood and meaning by varying your line length, just as you can by varying your sentence structure. Punctuation The use of standard marks and signs in writing and printing to seperate words into sentences, clauses, and phrases in order to clarify meaning. You can create confusion or perhaps insecurity by including no punctuation. Rythm The arrangment of stressed and unstressed sounds in writing and speech. Rythm may be regular or it may be varied. UNDERSTANDING THE MEANING OF POETRY STRUCTURE Form: Ballad, Concrete, Elegy, Epic, Free Verse, Haiku, Lyric, Ode, Sonnet, Villanelle, Slam Couplets, Triplets, Quatrains, etc.

Stanza pattern:

Rhyme Schemes: Rhythm:

ABAB; ABA, ABA; AA; etc. The "flow" of the poem. Does the poem have a regular "beat?" Iambic: unstressed; stressed Trochaic: stressed; unstressed

Anapestic: stressed; unstressed; unstressed

Line length:

monometer dimeter tetrameter quatrameter

trimeter pentameter

Enjambment:

When the idea or grammar does not stop naturally at the end of the line but flows into the next line without a pause. To stop short. A special kind of pause, usually in the middle of a line. I don't care too much for money, Money can't buy me love.

Catalectic: Caesura:

FIGURES OF SPEECH Connotation: Denotation: Hyperbole: Imagery: An idea associated with a word or phrase. The explicit meaning of a word Exaggeration used for effect. "tons of money", "a million thanks," What do you see in the poem? Whirl up whirl your pointed pines (the image of a forest

sea of pine

-trees

swaying back and forth cresting waves of a stormy sea.) Irony: Metaphor:

like

the

One thing is said, but the opposite meaning is intended. A comparison without "like" or "as". Where were the greenhouses Lunging into the Wind driving So far down the All the faucets stopped?

going, lashing water river

Metonymy:

A person or thing is not named directly, but by some associated thing. The prisoner addressed the bench. Ideas, or elements that recur throughout the poem. Words with opposite meanings. Old New tight slacks bitter-sweet York sweet sorrow good grief sanitary landfill

Motifs: Oxymoron:

Paradox: Personificati on:

A statement, which at first, seems contradictory or absurd. Human qualities are attributed to an animal, object, or idea. I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions. Whatever I see I swallow immediately Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike. I am not cruel, only truthful-Words with a double meaning. A bear walks into a bar and says: "How about a gin and ...................... .......................................... tonic? The bartender asks: "What's with the big pause?" The bear replies: "Just born with them, I guess." A word or phrase is used more than once for emphasis.

Pun:

Repetition:

See the flags; snow-white tent, See the bear and elephant, See the monkey jump the rope, Listen to the Kallyope, Kallyope, Kallyope! Simile: A comparison using "like" or "as". her lower was like an mint. i was a little in the candy store.

lip orange and crying boy

Synechdoch e: Symbolism:

A part represents the whole. A fleet of a hundred sail.

Something that stands for something else. (Myths & Legends)

SOUND DEVICES Alliteration: Two or more words in close succession beginning with the same letter or sound. I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Repetition of vowel sounds: Presume not on thy heart when mine is slain; Thou gavest me thine, not to give back again. Repetition of consonant sounds: You crash over the trees, You crack the live branch: the branch is white, the green crushed, each leaf is rent like split wood. "bra" and "cr" mimic the sound of branches cracking."sh" and "ch" imitate the sound of wind and rain. Onomatopoeia: The word imitates the sound associated with an object or action.

Assonance:

Consonance:

crack, splash, squeak, ding dong of the pitter patter of raindrops, the gong, murmuring, etc. INTERPRETING MEANING PLAIN SENSE FEELING TONE using just the words and punctuation. awe, tenderness, anger, amusement, etc.

creak, bells, buzzer,

Attitude towards the reader: confidential, appealing, etc. What is the poet trying to say? love, death, family, nature, the city, the country, age, youth, war, civilization, pestilence better to have loved and lost... respect your elders... absence makes the heart grow fonder... the rolling stone gathers no moss... etc... Is some kind of a lesson being taught?

INTENTION SUBJECT

THEME

MORAL

MODERNIST POETRY

"That's not it at all, that's not what I from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," by T. S. Eliot

meant

at

all"

The English novelist Virginia Woolf declared that human nature underwent a fundamental change "on or about December 1910." The statement testifies to the modern writer's fervent desire to break with the past, rejecting literary traditions that seemed outmoded and diction that seemed too genteel to suit an era of technological breakthroughs and global violence. "On or about 1910," just as the automobile and airplane were beginning to accelerate the pace of human life, and Einstein's ideas were transforming our perception of the universe, there was an explosion of innovation and creative energy that shook every field of artistic endeavor. Artists from all over the world converged on London, Paris, and other great cities of Europe to join in the

ferment of new ideas and movements: Cubism, Constructivism, Futurism, Acmeism, and Imagism were among the most influential banners under which the new artists grouped themselves. It was an era when major artists were fundamentally questioning and reinventing their art forms: Matisse and Picasso in painting, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein in literature, Isadora Duncan in dance, Igor Stravinsky in music, and Frank Lloyd Wright in architecture. The excitement, however, came to a terrible climax in 1914 with the start of the First World War, which wiped out a generation of young men in Europe, catapulted Russia into a catastrophic revolution, and sowed the seeds for even worse conflagrations in the decades to follow. By the war's end in 1918, the centuries-old European domination of the world had ended and the "American Century" had begun. For artists and many others in Europe, it was a time of profound disillusion with the values on which a whole civilization had been founded. But it was also a time when the avante-garde experiments that had preceded the war would, like the technological wonders of the airplane and the atom, inexorably establish a new dispensation, which we call modernism. Among the most instrumental of all artists in effecting this change were a handful of American poets. Ezra Pound, the most aggressively modern of these poets, made "Make it new!" his battle cry. In London Pound encountered and encouraged his fellow expatriate T. S. Eliot, who wrote what is arguably the most famous poem of the twentieth century--The Waste Land--using revolutionary techniques of composition, such as the collage. Both poets turned to untraditional sources for inspiration, Pound to classical Chinese poetry and Eliot to the ironic poems of the 19th century French symbolist poet Jules Laforgue. H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) followed Pound to Europe and wrote poems that, in their extreme concision and precise visualization, most purely embodied his famous doctrine of imagism. Among the American poets who stayed at home, Wallace Stevens--a mildmannered executive at a major insurance firm in Hartford, Connecticut--had a flair for the flashiest titles that poems have ever had: "Peter Quince at the Clavier," "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle." Stevens, the aesthete par excellence, exalted the imagination for its ability to "press back against the pressure of reality." What was new in Marianne Moore was her brilliant and utterly original use of quotations in her poetry, and her surpassing attention to the poetic image. What was new in E. E. Cummings was right on the surface, where all the words were in lower-case letters and a parenthesis "(a leaf falls)" may separate the "l" from "oneliness." William Carlos Williams wrote in "plain American which cats and dogs can read," to use a phrase of Marianne Moore. "No ideas but in things," he proclaimed. In succinct, often witty poems he presents common objects or events--a red

wheelbarrow, a person eating plums--with freshness and immediacy, enlarging our understanding of what a poem's subject matter can be. Unlike Williams, Robert Frost favored traditional devices--blank verse, rhyme, narrative, the sonnet form--but he, too, had a genius for the American vernacular, and his pitiless depiction of a cruel natural universe marks him as a peculiarly modern figure who is sometimes misread as a genial Yankee sage. Of the many modern poets who acted on the ambition to write a long poem capable of encompassing an entire era, Hart Crane was one of the more notably successful. In his poem "The Bridge," the Brooklyn Bridge is both a symbol of the new world and a metaphor allowing the poet to cross into different periods, where he may shake hands in the past with Walt Whitman and watch as the train called the Twentieth Century races into the future. See more http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5664#sthash.eZsM6WJD.dpuf EZRA POUND Ezra Pound is generally considered the poet most responsible for defining and promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry. In the early teens of the twentieth century, he opened a seminal exchange of work and ideas between British and American writers, and was famous for the generosity with which he advanced the work of such major contemporaries as W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, H. D., James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and especially T. S. Eliot. His own significant contributions to poetry begin with his promulgation of Imagism, a movement in poetry which derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetrystressing clarity, precision, and economy of language and foregoing traditional rhyme and meter in order to, in Pound's words, "compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome." His later work, for nearly fifty years, focused on the encyclopedic epic poem he entitled The Cantos. Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, in 1885. He completed two years of college at the University of Pennsylvania and earned a degree from Hamilton College in 1905. After teaching at Wabash College for two years, he travelled abroad to Spain, Italy and London, where, as the literary executor of the scholar Ernest Fenellosa, he became interested in Japanese and Chinese poetry. He married Dorothy Shakespear in 1914 and became London editor of the Little Review in 1917. In 1924, he moved to Italy; during this period of voluntary exile, Pound became involved in Fascist politics, and did not return to the United States until 1945, when he was arrested on charges of treason for broadcasting Fascist propaganda by radio to the United States during the Second World War. In 1946, at:

he was acquitted, but declared mentally ill and committed to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. During his confinement, the jury of the BollingenLibrary of Congress Award (which included a number of the most eminent writers of the time) decided to overlook Pound's political career in the interest of recognizing his poetic achievements, and awarded him the prize for the Pisan Cantos (1948). After continuous appeals from writers won his release from the hospital in 1958, Pound returned to Italy and settled in Venice, where he died, a semi-recluse, in 1972. POEMS BY EZRA POUND A Girl The tree has entered my hands, The sap has ascended my arms, The tree has grown in my breastDownward, The branches grow out of me, like arms. Tree you are, Moss you are, You are violets with wind above them. A child; so high; you are, And all this is folly to the world. The Fault of It Some may have blamed us that we cease to speak Of things we spoke of in our verses early, Saying: a lovely voice is such as such; Saying: that lady's eyes were sad last week, Wherein the world's whole joy is born and dies; Saying: she hath this way or that, this much Of grace, this way or that, this much Of grace, this little misericorde; Ask us no further word; If we were proud, then proud to be so wise Ask us no more of all the things ye heard; We may not speak of them, they touch us nearly.