one of the most important ways in which poetic language differs from the language of prose is in its use of imagery poetry is holistic language unlike conceptual or analytical language poetry does not separate thought from emotion sound from meaning or ideas from the physical body poetic language is experiential it tries to convey experience with the fullness and immediacy we actually feel in our lives writers often use imagery in analytical prose but it tends to be used in a secondary way usually the imagery is there to illustrate a conceptual point that the writer is making but in poetry imagery has a different and more important role imagery doesn't just illustrate meaning imagery becomes meaning now what is an image an image is a word or phrase that directly presents a sensory experience usually sight but sometimes sound touch taste or smell poetic language gives the image an independence and authority that ordinary prose or everyday speech does not poetry recognizes the power of images to work directly on our imagination and physical senses our intuition and memory to communicate meaning everyday prose usually feels the need to control images to make sure that they are not being misunderstood but used clearly to illustrate the idea the writer is trying to communicate the prose method is not inferior to the poetic method but it is fundamentally different if you want to be a poet or reader of poetry it is essential to understand that difference let's look at a couple of simple examples here is a prose sentence in los angeles it is usually quicker to take the metro than a bus you have two images here the metro and the bus but they aren't a specific bus or a specific metro car they are abstractions of the things in the same way if you say i like fruit especially oranges you're making a sort of a general statement about a general orange on a general person but if you say let's eat that big sweet juicy orange you are using the image in a fundamentally different way you're evoking the sense of taste of sight in a way that brings you to that sweet juicy orange not just any orange in poetry imagery is usually more tangible and less abstract more specific and less general more present and less remote than it would be in an equivalent prose passage the purpose of poetic imagery is usually to make you feel the physical presence of the thing here are the first two stanzas of theodore retki's famous poem my papa's waltz the whiskey on your breath could make a small boy dizzy but i hung on like death such waltzing was not easy we romped until the pans slid from the kitchen shelf my mother's countenance could not unfrown itself how many images are in these eight lines at least eight there is the drunken father the smell of whiskey on his breath the little boy the image of the boy hanging on the couple romping the pans sliding from the shelf the waltz itself and the mother's frowning face retki's imagery brings us directly into the scene the sights the mother frowning the sounds the the noise of the waltz the smells the whiskey on your breath the tactile feeling the little boy hanging on like death retki uses these to evoke a particular scene in which you physically feel yourself present poetry communicates holistically and much of the communication is physical and sensory imagery communicates directly to our five senses without an intermediary idea that is the key thing to remember about images imagery is primarily thought of as visual but it can be auditory olfactory tactile or gustatory but it is direct and it does not have an idea filtering it into a general perception what an image does is to unleash physical intelligence memory imagination intuition rather than appeal to rational thought at least initially we can go back and rationally analyze how the poem works but that is not how we experience it directly now let's examine another poem that consists entirely of imagery it's a short lyric poem by t.s eliot that describes a seemingly ordinary urban moment but as we read it let's ask ourselves what is the poem trying to communicate first literally and then associationally it has certain denotations it describes a scene rather exactly but it also suggests through connotation a larger meaning there seems to be a difference between what it says literally and what it suggests in broader sense it is one of t.s eliot's preludes and it goes by the title of its first line the winter evening settles down the winter evening settles down with smell of steaks and passageways six o'clock the burnt out ends of smoky days and now a gusty shower wraps the grimy scraps of withered leaves about your feet and newspapers from vacant lots the showers beat on broken blinds and chimney pots and at the corner of the street a lonely cab horse steams and stamps and then the lighting of the lamps now this poem speaks almost entirely through its images the images describe a physical scene but the speaker makes no general statements about his personal condition or the broader human condition and yet as we experience the poem the connotations and the associations of these direct physical images build in our imagination a sense of precisely those things which are not being said now when does the poem take place we know from the very first line that it is winter we know that it's getting dark and in a couple of lines we learned that it's precisely six o'clock the moment that darkness falls and the sense of darkness is intensified by the rain and the cold in the course of the poem we have a tactile olfactory visual and auditory images we have the smell of stakes and passageways we have the feeling of the cold you know we have the images of the rain of grimy scraps of leaves of newspapers we have the auditory image of the showers beating on broken blinds and chimney pots and then the poem ends with a kind of stunning visual image in this dark cold rainy night there is the sudden lighting of the street lamps a sudden change in the visual universe of the poem this is an interesting poem because it shows you how much a poet can communicate by giving direct images without saying anything more the particular power of imagery comes from its ability to bypass the analytical part of the mind and present itself directly to the senses now we experience uh this kind of language every day in something we call advertising now think of if advertising was trying to communicate in general conceptual language they would say eat bacon it tastes good instead what they do is they show you bacon cooking on a grill in a way that evokes the scent and the taste of bacon they know that is a more powerful way of communicating the thing itself or if there was a advertisement that simply said drink beer instead they show a shot of a cold beer being poured into a glass with its foam rising they know that that physical image evokes much more appetite for beer than the abstract statement or think of it in terms of journalism political journalism you could have a headline that says war is bad but it's if you show an atrocity of war the photograph of the suffering and destruction that it causes the viewer has a visceral reaction more powerful than what the abstract statement could give you imagery has always been important to poetry you find imagery through poetry in pretty much every culture in every age but in the modern period imagery became central to the style that writers adopted many poets felt that imagery gave them a particular power to jump over the rational mind with its powerful but conventional ways of understanding the world most of us have a kind of set framework by which we judge experience the poet is trying in a sense to bypass that and get directly into our imagination our memory our physical bodies but if you let the image speak to the unconscious mind it unlocks memories instincts desires and fears that most people don't want to summon into their everyday consciousness the power and origins of imagery also became a central part of the study of psychology sigmund freud analyzed the images that his patients used to describe their lives and problems he believed that imagery was the way in which the unconscious mind revealed its secrets freud's student carl jung developed the idea of imagery even further jung presented a theory of archetypal imagery universal ways in which a collective unconscious communicated primal experiences common to the human race jung believed that the entire human race shared certain instinctive responses expressed by a small set of common archetypal images such as fire or flood the shadow the wise old man jung believed these archetypes reflected experience so early and so deeply rooted in human history that they were actually hardwired into the human mind now you may have been thinking more like a poet than a scientist but his conviction that images carried primal energy has a relevance to how all literature works but now let's turn to the important role that imagery has played in the history of poetry especially modern poetry poetry originated in song ancient poetry was an auditory performative art sung or chanted by a bard or shaman in the physical presence of an audience the text the words of the poem were heard not seen there was in fact originally no written text of a poem it was performative even after the invention of writing poetry remained primarily a musical art whose energy and power was mostly auditory a poem could be experienced on the written page but it was still something that was conceived of primarily as an auditory shape but with the rise of printed books and mechanical typography in the renaissance poetry became a more visual art the printed text was easier to read than a handwritten manuscript the visual presence of the text increased and the image began to play a more important role in the art in fact the first major school of modernist english poetry focused on the visual possibilities of the typographic text and they called themselves the imagists to announce their new allegiances the group of poets was led by ezra pound who was the most influential early modernist poet in the english language pound was a great poet essayist editor and catalytic personality he was also the first great theorist of modernism in english pound and the imagists were fascinated by the notion of creating a new kind of poetry based on sight more than sound driven by spatial rather than temporal concerns music consists of sounds moving through time it has a temporal organization but visual art consists of expressive images filling a defined space a framed space it is a spatial art when a song is over it ceases to exist in its temporal medium but words on a page like a painting on a wall can hold meaning outside time they can even be grasped in different temporal orders let's look at a famous short early modernist poem by ezra pound it is a tiny poem only three lines of typography and one of those lines is the title it was written in 1916 and it is called in a station of the metro the apparition of these faces in the crowd petals on a wet black bow each line has a separate semantic identity complete and independent in itself the title describes a place in a station of the metro which suggests that it is in paris this first line of text is simply an image of motion the apparition of these faces and in the crowd and the second line of text seems to be unrelated to everything that's come before it it presents another image that it simply offers without any explanation in relationship to the title and to the first line the poem is not easily comprehended the first time one reads it the eye naturally skips up and down trying to figure out the connections within this spatial organization this vertical arrangement of three visual images pounds poem is very much like a haiku another form that came into english around the same time the haiku which is one of the great japanese forms of poetry consists of 17 syllables usually linking to images the notion of having images denote the meaning is fundamental to most japanese poetry here for example is one of the great masters of the haiku and japanese tanaguchi busone this was written in the 18th century there's no title in the original the piercing chill i feel my dead wife's comb in our bedroom under my heel the piercing chill i feel is the first image it's the tactile and it's related to a combination sort of tactile and visual image my dead wife's comb in our bedroom under my heel now let's go to a modern american version of this here is a poem by lee girga the title is the first line as it is in pound visitors room everything bolted down except my brother this is a poem which once again suggests a great deal more than it says explicitly visitors room everything bolted down except my brother the sudden shift in poetry into visual organization leads to many of the key developments of modern poetry and it ultimately divides poetry into different aesthetic classes and you see this across the modern arts there are the visual arts painting sculpture architecture photography versus the temporal arts music dance poetry movies and you see poetry as it were moving from the temporal arts into the visual hearts it fundamentally changes the way a poem is organized and communicates let's end by looking at two short poems which use this notion of a visual image to basically build its meaning without explicitly saying it the first poem is by wallace stevens it's called disillusionment of 10 o'clock the houses are haunted by white nightgowns none are green or purple with green rings or green with yellow rings or yellow with blue rings none of them are strange with socks of lace and beaded scent yours people are not going to dream of baboons and periwinkles only here or there an old sailor drunk and asleep in his boots catches tigers in red weather that is a poem which i think for most people when they first read it they're not really sure what it's about although when you look at it it is quite explicit and clear as to what it describes the problem readers have is they're not quite sure what the description means the meaning of this poem is largely in the associations that this welter of images creates now this is an entirely visual poem it has eight colors mentioned in the first six lines there are no metaphors there are no similes the poetic energy is generated by the images without any kind of general explanation of why the images are being offered now what is the setting of this poem we know that it's in houses around 10 o'clock we presume 10 o'clock in the evening as people are dressing for bed but it doesn't explain it any more than that now from what we know of wallace stevens's life we could say well this perhaps describes uh his feelings in some ways of having gone from new york city to hartford connecticut and seeing the kind of slow pace of the suburbs but it goes well beyond any autobiographical explanation we see haunted houses and we ask the question who's haunting them well they seem to be haunted by the living once again it's a visual image of a person in a nightgown largely resembling the traditional image of a ghost and what we see is the contrast between the white nightgowns that are being worn and all of the purple green yellow and blue nightgowns that they might have worn the poem also goes into essentially two sections you have this long catalog of the various night grounds that are not being worn it's interesting it gives images that are not present into the last four lines when suddenly the poem shifts with his image of a drunken sailor asleep in his boots dreaming of catching tigers in red weather so what it resembles in a way is a kind of elaborate and extended haiku but the key thing to pay attention to is that stevens achieves these memorable powerful and kind of haunting effects entirely through images without the use of any conceptual statements now let's end with just a quick look at a famous contemporary poem by stevie smith it is in fact her most famous poem and we really don't have to look at anything more than the title to see the power of the image which is not waving but drowning nobody heard him the dead man but still he lay moaning i was much further out than you thought and not waving but drowning poor chap he always loved harking and now he's dead it must have been too cold for him his heart gave way they said oh no no no it was too cold always still the dead one lay moaning i was much too far out all my life and not waving but drowning now there is so much that one can say about this poem not the least of which is that in some ways it seems to be a conversation between living people and the dead person who is uh still offering a commentary on his life but i simply want to focus on one thing the power of the image we're given an image of a person out at sea with an arm being raised which is an image which is misunderstood by the people on the shore they think that he's just fooling around and waving at them but he's actually signaling for help in the course of the poem stevie smith does a wonderful thing she takes this image this physical image which is misunderstood and makes it into a symbol for this dead person's entire life who was always in a sense isolated in this cold life and signaling to be rescued images generate much of the energy of poetry they have the power to bypass the rational mind with all of its elaborate filters and speak directly to the physical body imagination memory and unconscious mind if poetry is a special way of speaking and writing that rewards a special way of listening and reading then imagery is one of the main ways that poetry achieves its heightened power you