image explains

End with an image and don’t explain.

—Stanley Kunitz (no citation, but quoted in many places).

feeling things

Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling.

—Wei T’ai, (A poet of Sung Dynasty cited in A.C. Graham’s Poems of the Late T’ang), quoted by Charles Reznikoff.

ethical relationship

All good poetry depends on the ethical relation between imagination and the image. Images are not ornaments; they are truths.

—Eavan Boland, “A Kind of Scar,” Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (W.W. Norton, 1996)

new image, new world

But phenomenology of the imagination cannot be content with a reduction which would make the image a subordinate means of expression: it demands, on the contrary, that images live directly, that they be taken as sudden events in life. When the image is new, the world is new.

― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1994, p. 47)

lyric bauble

Sometimes a poet becomes so completely absorbed in the lyrical possibilities of certain combinations of sounds that he forgets what he started out to say, if anything, and here again a nasty tangle results. This type of obscurity is one which I have great sympathy for: I know that quite frequently in the course of delivering himself of a poem, a poet will find himself in possession of a lyric bauble—a line as smooth as velvet to the ear, as pretty as a feather to the eye, yet a line definitely out of plumb with the frame of the poem. What to do with a trinket like this is always troubling to a poet, who is naturally grateful to his Muse for small favors. Usually he just drops the shining object into the body of the poem somewhere and hopes it won’t look too giddy.

—E. B. White, “Unzip the Veil,” One Man's Meat, p146

erotic image

The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities, and rhyme a copulation of sounds; poetry eroticizes language and the world, because the operation is erotic to begin with.

—Octavio Paz, "The Double Flame"

at the heart of things

The image is the essential poem at the heart of things.

—C.G. Jung

catapultic language

[W]e will not go back to our tired-out metaphors, we will not slip into the shoes of habit. We want to hear a catapultic language, one that will make the ceiling cave in and the earth tremble. Poetry is by nature stormy, and every image should produce a cataclysm.

—Louis Aragon, "Treatise on Style"

consecrated images

Evocativeness is the power of an image to evoke from us a response to the poetic passion. An image need not be novel to do this; there are well-worn words such as moon, rose, hills, West--'consecrated images', Mr. G. H. W. Rylands calls them—which always tend to create this response; and conversely, we may admire an image for its freshness without being moved it.

—C. Day Lewis, The Poetic Image (Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1984, p.40)

body forth

We body forth our ideals in personal acts, either alone or with others in society. We body forth felt experience in a poem’s image and sound. We body forth our inner residence in the architecture of our homes and common buildings. We body forth our struggles and our revelations in the space of theatre. That is what form is: the bodying forth. The bodying forth of the living vessel in the shapes of clay.

—M.C. Richards, Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person (Wesleyan U. Press, 1969)

vague and indeterminate

The Italian poet Leopardi believed that vagueness was an essential characteristic of poetry, allowing the mind to "wander in the realm of the vague and indeterminate, in the realm of those childlike ideas which are born out of the ignorance of the whole.”

See G. Singh’s wonderful book, Leopardi and the Theory of Poetry (U. of Kentucky Press, 1964). Singh writes: “It is because the poet is attracted to what is vague and indefinite, more than what is clear, concrete, and precise, that his language, even when it does not contain a full-fledged image or simile or metaphor, does to a certain extent partake of the character of an image or a symbol, both saying and suggesting something much more than what it commonly would outside of poetry.”

ordinary mythos

when my central image is a wind-screen wiper, I feel myself just as mythopoeic as if I were writing about the Grael.

—Louis MacNeice, Don’t Ask Me What I Mean: Poets in Their Own Words, edited by Clare Brown & Don Paterson (Picador, 2003)

image to archetype

At its best, metaphor transforms the image into archetype--a deepening process—the transformational power of the ingeniously conceived and well-rendered metaphor. [JF]

image

No image satisfies me unless it is at the same time Knowledge, unless it carries with it its substance as well as its lucidity.
…
That which belongs to the realm of the image is irreducible by reason and must remain within the image or be annihilated.

—Antonin Artaud, “Manifesto in Clear Language”

magic latern

The image is the magic lantern which lights up the poets in their darkness. But images aren’t alone. There are passages between them which also must be poetry.

—Jules Supervielle,”Thinking About a Poetics” Mid-Century French Poets, edited by Wallace Fowlie Grove Press, 1955)