I especially like what James Hillman suggests about image as the simultaneous process/product of the psyche. And Bachelard's sense that image is primary--before metaphor.
But it isn’t enough, just to name an object.
In his college textbook, Sound and Sense, Perrine defined "imagery" in poetry as "the representation of sensory experience through language." Words that name things or physical qualities of things. But, following Bachelard and Hillman and others, I think it is useful to distinguish such words when functioning as what I'll call "details" (remaining relatively prosaic in their engagement of the imagination) from "images," words that engage the imagination more fully and at a "deeper"--sub-conscious--level. Somewhere Bachelard remarks that only things have the strength to carry the burden of human emotions. Aesthetic, imagaic, crafting of words for things can construct an imaginative "world" in which the order of things expresses the archetypal patterns of our imagination, expressively supporting and ordering our emotions.
E.g., perhaps Pound's falling and clinging petals could appear as factual "details" in a textbook on horticulture (though this seems least likely, as does an appearance of Williams's red wheelbarrow in a textbook on organic gardening—aesthetic specificality produces an imaginative universality, rather than the merely rational one that is needed in science or instruction); or they might appear as descriptive details in a passage in a novel, that functions in the reader's imagination as one of many "details" setting the scene (they can function as image in a novel). In a stanza that set that scene in a poem, the petals would be recognized as "imagery" in Perrine's sense. In a Frost poem they would make a subtle move toward metaphor, as they were overdetermined with suggestions of the intangible; and in Robert Francis's poem, "Light Casualties," they would participate in the movement by analogy to metaphorically explore the painful reality of that title phrase. But as Frost and Francis moved toward metaphor, they would tap our deeper, imagaic, archetypal imagination of our world of things; the image would, as Bachelard suggested, come first, and would be more powerful because less diluted by intellect. (In French symbolism the petals would be present only in words that moved the imagination away from thingness until they expressed Idea, the poetic petals that are absent from any thingy spring orchard or countryside, and present only in the mind.)
The power of Pound’s poem, achieved through depth of "image,"--moving into thingyness, focusing on the things outside the mind/window pane, in order to explore and understand the re-creating apparition in the viewer--can be explored by noting how many gods (sub-conscious complexes, primary patterns in the imagination) gather in the poem: Persephone on the threshold—Hermes—of returning to Demeter; Hades in the darkness of the bough; Aphrodite (that loving beauty, beautiful love, which is the harmonious wholeness of being*) in the beauty of the scene (but wait--"say it, no ideas but in things").
*See Hillman on "the heart's imagination."
On a somewhat related note, what about naming emotions. While few readers would prohibit the use of names of emotions, I do think that those words often weaken a poem, by flattening it (which I’m guessing is the opposite effect of what the writer intends, and thinks that he or she is achieving). At the least, we need to put the imagination of the emotion into the reader’s consciousness along with naming it. One of my favorite examples of a poem in which I think the emotion is communicated before it is named is Pound’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife—A Letter”. As we read her letter to her husband, who has been away for months, we come to imagine what she is feeling, in a fair degree of precision and nuance. Then, when, late in the poem, she says, of certain things in nature in autumn, “They hurt me,” (i.e. when Pound names the emotion), we already believe that the emotion is real, and we have a good sense of what it is. This is a good example of the ability to use things to convey emotion.
Tom Koontz, Editor
Barnwood magazine
Barnwood Press