at the heart of things

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

—C.G. Jung

fine excess

In Poetry I have a few axioms, and you will see how far I am from their centre. I think Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity — it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance — Its touches of Beauty should never be halfway thereby making the reader breathless instead of content: the rise, the progress, the setting of imagery should like the Sun come natural to him — shine over him and set soberly although in magnificence leaving him in the luxury of twilight — but it is easier to think what Poetry should be than to write it — and this leads me on to another axiom. That if Poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.

—John Keats, letter to John Taylor (February 27, 1818)

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)

eschews metaphor

Haiku eschews metaphor, simile, and personification. Nothing is like something else in most well-realized haiku. As Basho said: "Learn of the pine from a pine." Learn, that is, what a pine tree is, not what it is like—one supposes this is what Basho meant.

—Kenneth Yasuda, The Japanese Haiku (Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1957)

mise en scène

Mise en scène is a French term and originates in the theater. It means, literally, "put in the scene." For film, it has a broader meaning, and refers to almost everything that goes into the composition of the shot, including the composition itself: framing, movement of the camera and characters, lighting, set design and general visual environment, even sound as it helps elaborate the composition. Mise-en-scène can be defined as the articulation of cinematic space, and it is precisely space that it is about.
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Mise en scène is a useful term when thinking about imagery in poetry and how the visualized environment is arrayed and apprehended via the resources of language. [JF]
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