1. 2 Uses of image
The first question is one best left to psychologists and philosophers of language. Perhaps one of the most complete philosophical inquiries was that of Gaston Bachelard. He 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 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.”[2] 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.”[2] Bachelard is, of course, just one person’s opinion on the matter, but his philosophy 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 you will at least keep in line with one major aspect of its origin, that of the unknown. 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”. 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. In Pound’s definition, the image is not just a stand in for something else; it is a putting-into-word 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: 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; there is something sensual, and a bit of emotion. 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? 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. 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. 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.
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