Today, we will be discussing effective use of imagery in poetry.  We will go over the following topics:

 
The American Heritage Illustrated Encyclopedic Dictionary defines imagery as follows:

1. The production of mental pictures or images.

2a. The employment of comparisons or vivid descriptions in writing or speaking to produce mental images. 2b. Any metaphorical representation, as in literature or art.

3a. Representative images, particularly statues or icons. 3b. The art of making such images.

For the purposes of this article, we will be focusing on both parts of definition #2. Additionally, what this classical definition of imagery may seem to lack is the impact to the other senses besides visual: auditory (hearing), olfactory (smell), gustatory (taste), tactile (touch), organic (biological), and kinesthetic (movement)*. (*Source: Wikipedia entry on Imagery.)

An important distinction of imagery in literature is that it does not necessarily have to be an actual description of the image.  Any part of a poem that has the effect of producing an image is, by definition, imagery.  Therefore, there are a number of different ways that an image can be produced, for example, through the typical poetic tools such as similes, metaphors, symbolism, allusion, personification, as well as referencing actual sounds via onomatopoeia, feelings via their bodily or mental effect, etc.

  Different Types of Imagery   

As stated previously, imagery can be experienced with any of the five senses, in addition to having an organic or kinesthetic reaction to poetry. For example, in "Sea: Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur" by Jack Kerouac, you find a particular sense being directly accessed:

Cherson!
Cherson!
 You aint just whistlin
   Dixie, Sea------
 Cherson! Cherson !
  We calcimine fathers
   here below!
 Kitchen light on-----
  Sea Engines from Russia
   seabirding here below-----
When rocks outsea froth
 I’ll know Hawaii
 cracked up & scramble
 up my doublelegged cliff
to the silt of
   a million years-----
Shoo-----Shaw-----Shirsh-----
Go on die salt light
 You billion yeared
  rock knocker
Gavroom
Seabird
Gabroobird
Sad as wife & hill
Loved as mother & fog
Oh! Oh! Oh!
  Sea! Osh!
Where’s yr little Neppytune
   tonight?

Kerouac is attempting to use onomatopoeia to mimic the actual sounds of the Pacific ocean within the confines of a poem. When the reader hears “Shoo-----Shaw-----Shirsh-----” in their mind, they may experience the sound of the ocean as translated phonetically into words, which may, in turn, transport them to the beach.


In “Praise for Sick Women” by Gary Snyder, the element of motion can be found:

Hand on sleeve: she holds leaf turning
         In sunlight on spiderweb;
Makes him flick like trout through shallows
Builds into ducks and cold marshes
Sucks out the quiet: bone rushes in
Behind the cool pupil a knot grows
Sudden roots sod him and solid him
Rain falls from skull-roof mouth is awash
           with small creeks
Hair grows, tongue tenses out – and she
Quick turn of the head: back glancing, one hand
Fingers smoothing the thigh, and he sees.

Most every line here involves some element of movement intermixed with its result.  You can find a wonderful example of this in “Sudden roots sod him and solid him”.  The action of “sudden roots” sodding and making solid demonstrates how effective the imagery of motion can be when combined within other elements of imagery. 

  Imagery and Context  

 How much context is required within the poem in order for imagery to be effective?  How much should imagery rely on personal context of the reader or popular connotation in order to be effective?  By context, we are referring to the meaning of something as defined by its association with other ideas or definitions. The context of an image is created either by its proximity to other ideas, images, definitions, settings in the same poem, or by definitions or “baggage” the reader carries with them into their reading of the poem and understanding of the image.  Meaning is essential to an image in a poem. It can be as simple as declaring love, but imagery without context, without meaning or a narrative, is empty. It may dazzle initially, but eventually, a reader can sense an emptiness, and they may come to this question: “why am I reading this?”  In an essay entitled “Poetry” Ralph Waldo Emerson writes:

Seas, forests, metals, diamonds and fossils interest the eye, but ‘t is only with some preparatory or predicting charm. Their value to the intellect appears only when I hear their meaning made plain in the spiritual truth they cover. The mind, penetrated with the sentiment or its thought, projects it outward on whatever it beholds.

By connotation, we are speaking about the baggage that a word, phrase, or image will carry with it, almost regardless as to how it is employed within a poem.  This baggage is derived from opinions and projections made by society as a whole, from popular media, from friends and family, history, technology, the evolution of language, etc.  Context and connotation are both key to engaging the reader with whatever stream of images the poet lays before them. And to be effective, the poet must be thoughtful of not only their own “mind, penetrated with … sentiment”, but the likelihood of the readers’ projections, colloquial definitions, and the bias of their personal experiences will have a major impact on how the image is received. It does not mean that context should always be universal, as that would impractical, if not impossible.  And the effort to project familiar things upon the mind’s eye of the reader should not induce the employment of cliches.  Often, poets may not understand or even consider their own origins for an image, relying instead on a stream-of-consciousness tactic to produce sensory material.  So, while poems do rely somewhat on the reader's context, it may be hard for a poet to know what their own context is, much less how or why it may affect or be affected by others’ personal contexts.

There are times when it may be obvious as to what the implied experiences of an image are. If you write a poem about rape, it will probably affect the reader based on their own personal experience of rape or if they have been close to someone who has been raped, their understanding of the other’s experience. But with poetry, it’s not always about the reader’s personal experience.  The audience for a poem will have an expectation that the poem is someone else’s journey.  They will simultaneously want to connect with the image, while also wanting to learn something they did not know, some new connection between their own consciousness and the shared consciousness that is being created by their reading of the poem.  

The personal context of a reader can also affect the reading of a poem if they are uninterested in the subject, although strong vivid imagery can change or reverse that lack of interest. One of the things some poets worry about is when they choose to write about and find meaning in historical subjects and figures, like Jane Grey, a medieval painter of icons, which may contain obscure fairy tales that are not necessarily the crowd-pleasers that the subject of “love” is. These poets want very much to convey why some obscure things are meaningful to them, hoping it will render them meaningful to others while delighting in imagery and the musicality of language for its own sake.  Thus, the lack of context for a reader can be overcome by the aesthetics of a poem.
In “My Alba” by Allen Ginsberg, he writes:

Now that I've wasted
five years in Manhattan
life decaying
talent a blank
talking disconnected
patient and mental
sliderule and number
machine on a desk
autographed triplicate
synopis and taxes
obedient prompt
poorly paid
stayed on the market
youth of my twenties
fainted in offices
wept on typewriters
deceived multitudes
in vast conspiracies
deodorant battleships
serious business industry

Here, Ginsburg makes several short and seemingly isolated statements related to things he has done while wasting “five years in Manhattan”.  Many of the lines are very clearly references to his personal experience.  He may seem somewhat unconcerned with whether or not the reader has any personal context for many of these images, such as “deodorant battleships”.  But, somehow, it’s still effective.  Due to the preponderance of colorful associations with working a 9 - 5 job and its soul-crushing effects, the reader is allowed their own license to associate a meaning with “vast conspiracies” that is connected to the more universal image of “autographed triplicate/synopis and taxes”. 

An example of clearly constructed and communicated context can be found in “The Abortion” by Anne Sexton:

Somebody who should have been born
is gone.

Just as the earth puckered its mouth,
each bud puffing out from its knot,
I changed my shoes, and then drove south.

Up past the Blue Mountains, where
Pennsylvania humps on endlessly,
wearing, like a crayoned cat, its green hair,

its roads sunken in like a gray washboard;
where, in truth, the ground cracks evilly,
a dark socket from which the coal has poured, 

Somebody who should have been born
is gone.

the grass as bristly and stout as chives,
and me wondering when the ground would break,
and me wondering how anything fragile survives;

up in Pennsylvania, I met a little man,
not Rumpelstiltskin, at all, at all...
he took the fullness that love began.

Returning north, even the sky grew thin
like a high window looking nowhere.
The road was as flat as a sheet of tin.

Somebody who should have been born
is gone.

Yes, woman, such logic will lead
to loss without death. Or say what you meant,
you coward...this baby that I bleed.

The strong and unusual descriptors and phrases Sexton utilizes throughout the poem, such as “ the earth puckered its mouth”, “bud puffing out from its knot”, “the ground cracks evilly, a dark socket” would make little sense except for the title of the poem and the well placed repetition of the line “Somebody who should have been born is gone.”  The reader is lead directly to the context for the otherwise odd metaphors, drawing them to the conclusions the poet would have them draw: that the shapes and characteristics of the very planet are all part of the conspiracy to rob an unborn child of its life.  Because the title and the first line set the tone for all subsequent images, there is no need for discovery of context; every scene falls easily in line with the overall vision.

Literal or Direct Imagery Versus Figurative or Implied Imagery   

Direct imagery is the outright description of what the poet sees, and by extension, what the reader must see.  It is generally a narrative form of objects and their descriptors that make up the conditions and the setting, the atmosphere.  An example of this can be found in “Kubla Khan”  by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which is also an excellent example of visual imagery:

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;
And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

Line after line is busy describing exactly what Coleridge sees, like if he were an investigative reporter relaying the sequence of images exactly as he sees them, perhaps stopping to draw a comparison or two, but not relying heavily on similes or analogies.  This sort of imagery can most often be found in prose, as the careful construction of a scene is critical to the prose reader’s experience.

However, imagery need not be directly stated, or narrated, as is customary in a story where the scenery and setting must be laid out in plain sight in order for the reader to know precisely where they are or where the voice of the writer is.  Because of the relative economy of words typical in poetry vs. prose, the room for creating setting by way of direct imagery is limited.  Also, part of the allure of poetry is allowing the reader to form ideas and images themselves, rather than telling the reader what they see.  One example of this might be found in  “the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls” by E. E. Cummings:

the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds
(also, with the church's protestant blessings
daughters,unscented shapeless spirited)
they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead,
are invariably interested in so many things—
at the present writing one still finds
delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles?
perhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy
scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D

The imagery that is directly communicated amounts to descriptions of the “ladies” having “comfortable minds” and many interests, the actual image of them knitting and gossiping about local scandals is also present.  But what are the implied images?  What comes to the readers’ minds without being told to do so in so many words?  The use of the phrase “furnished souls” might imply a predetermined pattern of behavior or lack of creative thinking by the subjects, but might also conjure an actual visual scene, perhaps in a typical Victorian style house in Cambridge, Massachusetts where one might find ladies knitting around a coffee table of a well “furnished” house, discussing the banalities of day, and seeming “dead” to the true mysteries of the word.  Many of these images are implied, but no less powerful and meaningful, having come to the reader through the back door of their own knowledge and experience, and/or by their own intuition.  

Another example can be found in “Elm” by Sylvia Plath

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

The imagery is quite clear without the reader being told what it is.  Pictures of weird fungal formations from “feathery turnings” or cancerous mutations from “malignity” pop into the reader’s mind from association.  And these associations are quite purposeful and the reader’s response is anticipated by Plath when she ends the poem with:

These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.

Plath has succeeded in producing metaphorical imagery that illustrates her own inner conceptualization of a deadly illness by implying its progression, and stating its result. The context of the images helps crystallize them, gives them power and weight that they would otherwise lack. 

  What Makes Imagery “Effective”?   

Understanding what imagery is, what forms it can take, and how it can be used are all good first steps in applying effective imagery. Imagery can be subtle or vivid but it should always support, expand or even give meaning to a poem.  In assessing whether an image in a poem is doing what you want it to do, it’s best to step back and ask yourself some questions about what the image’s purpose is, or what it is accomplishing:

1. Does the image lead the reader to the next line, to the first line, and/or to the close of a poem?

2. Does the image illuminate the reader’s understanding of the origin or purpose of the poem?

3. Does the image suit the poem? For example, does it fit within the theme, the strength, the literal or figurative characteristics of the poem, the feeling it evokes?  Does it suit the poet?

4. Is the description of the image original?

Regarding question #4, one of the easiest ways to insure that an image does not fall flat within your verse is to take care choosing the words you use and the way you use them when creating the image.  Contrary to what may be a common belief, an image itself is not always cliché so much as how that image is described. Iconic themes such as blood, death, love/affection, God or gods, nature, sex, etc., are commonplace in poetry.  Taking blood, for example, the image is an important one in art.  It is symbolic of so many things, including life, injury, death, and a million other metaphorical representations.  Being so common, you might believe that in order to employ this image at all is risking the originality of the entire poem, but that’s not always necessarily true.  The idea of clichéd imagery versus clichéd descriptions can be summarized in phrases like:

“crimson tears”, “river of blood”, “broken veins”, etc.

In these cases, it is not always the image of blood that is clichéd.  Blood is such a shared human characteristic and experience that to completely avoid it in all forms is to deny an axiom of our biological and psychological birthright. But that doesn’t mean you need to use a word or phrase that has been regurgitated over and over, ad nauseam.  Common themes of life deserve uncommon treatment in art. Approach the image from a different angle, try to imply the scene, theme, object, its flavor or motion, even its consequence, instead of spelling it out in the same, overused language.  In “Destroying Beauty” by Charles Bukowski, the possibility of blood could be said to be hinted at, while never actually spoken of or otherwise confirmed:

a rose
red sunlight;
I take it apart
in the garage
like a puzzle:
the petals are as greasy
as old bacon
and fall
like maidens of the world
backs to the floor
and I look up
at the old calendar
hung from a nail
and touch
my wrinkled face
and smile
because
the secret
is beyond me.

Blood is not the theme of this poem, nor is there anything but perhaps the mildest allusion to it.  The juxtaposition of the petals of the rose and its “red sunlight”, its greasy petals, the fact that they “fall / like maidens of the word” against the poet’s own “wrinkled face” implies that there is blood behind the either stretch of skin.  The image springs up from seemingly nowhere and into the reader’s consciousness without beating them over the head with blatant illustrations.  Allowing the reader to discover and connect with an image rather than handing it to them can be a very powerful tool in poetry. 

Regarding whether an image suits a poem or poet, poetry often involves deftly relaying a thought or feeling by an indirect, unusual or an imaginative route. However, a balance must be struck between over-thinking an image and utilizing it efficiently. The use of very vivid, unusual and original images in a poem should only be attempted if the “voice” in the poem supports it. Some poets may need a more restrained imagery because of the the voice of the poem requires it due to a minimalistic theme, the vividness or subdued tone of the rest of the poem, the purpose or intent of the poem, or the poet’s own disposition.

Many poets may resort to what is generally considered clichéd imagery because they may feel those phrases to be more soothing to themselves, and/or to some readers. Writing about the familiar in familiar ways may be seen as a way to connect everyone to the answers they are seeking in a poem, like a well known bedtime story.  In order for a poet to understand what they want their imagery to accomplish, they need to first decide whether it is their intent to write a well written poem with unique effective imagery, or just to write the poem they want to write. If it is more important to the poet to be uniquely effective, rather than just recognizable or relatable, then giving extra thought to each image in a poem is a worthwhile exercise.