The ancients believed that meaning was an internal abstract mind, just like an external concrete object; Meaning originates from the heart and is expressed through images, which are actually the sustenance of meaning. In fact, China's traditional poetics refers to the artistic techniques of expressing feelings in scenery, borrowing scenery to express feelings and blending scenes. The process of poetry creation is a process of observation, feeling, brewing and expression, and a process of reappearing life.
Sometimes, social things recited in poetry, characters depicted, life scenes depicted, social life plots and historical facts laid out are also used to entrust feelings, which is also an image. That is, the social image relative to the object image and the natural image.
It is a term used in the analysis of poetry and prose, which refers to everything that constitutes artistic conception. This kind of thing often carries the author's subjective feelings, and these images combine to form an artistic conception.
For example, in Ma Zhiyuan's "Qiu Si", in the sentence "The old vine cries faintly, and the small bridge flows water", it is interpreted as follows: At dusk, a group of crows landed on the old vine and made a piercing cry. Under the small bridge, the running water tinkled, and a thin horse on the ancient road struggled against the west wind.
Dead vines, old trees, faint crows, small bridges, running water and people are all images in the poem. When these images are combined together, they become a sad and sad artistic conception. The image is concrete, and the artistic conception is the combination of the overall environment and feelings composed of concrete things. Feelings are pinned on the scene, and there are feelings in the scene, and the scene blends.
Origin of the image:
China had the theory of image long ago, and I ching said that "viewing things and taking images" and "setting images and taking images" long ago. However, the image of Zhouyi is a divination image, which is composed of two symbols, Yang and Yin. These two symbols are combined into sixty-four hexagrams, which were originally used to record the universe and its changing laws, and later developed into historical and philosophical categories.
Poetics borrowed and extended the principle of "setting an image to the best of its meaning", but the "image" in poetry is not a divinatory image, not an abstract symbol, but a concrete and sensible object image. This ability to create images is always the symbol of a poet.
Metaphor is an important means of poetry (literature), and similes abound in Homer's poems. Aristotle first pointed out that metaphor is the basis of poetry, and the so-called simile or metaphor, that is, the image of metaphor, is called metaphor (the image produced by metaphor).
Hegel's definition of beauty and art is also related to the image theory in poetry: beauty is the perceptual expression of ideas. The content of art is the idea, and the form of art is the image appealing to the senses. Art should reconcile these two aspects into a free and unified whole.