Image theory originated in China very early, Zhouyi? 6? "1 copula" has always been said as "seeing things and taking pictures" and "setting the pictures to their best meaning". The image in Zhouyi is a divinatory image, a symbol, and a sixty-four hexagrams trying to summarize everything in the world, which belongs to the philosophical category. 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.
The practical application of image in poetry should be before the formation of image theory. According to legend, when Shun abdicated, he sang "Qing" with his ministers, saying, "Clear clouds are rotten, embarrassing, and the sun and the moon are bright, which is Fudan!" (1) This is a pure imagery poem. It skillfully uses images, auspicious clouds are bright and endless, and the sun and the moon shine forever, symbolizing the prosperity of the country and educating the country for a long time, so as to eulogize and bless it. The image theory of poetry, if not borrowed from the image theory of Zhouyi, will also be summarized from the image practice of poetry.
Poetry attaches importance to images because "words can't convey all the meaning" and logical language can't perfectly express the meaning in the poet's mind, so we have to "set images to convey all the meaning", (2) use images to appeal to sensibility and make another expression. "In fact, words and symbols have little aftertaste, and it is difficult for animals to express their feelings directly, so they show images." (3) The purpose and function of image in poetry is to mark "meaning" with "image". Image is a metaphor, a symbol, and it is "endless meaning, which can be seen beyond the words".
China's poetics has always attached importance to the relationship between "meaning" and "image", namely, the relationship between "emotion" and "scene", the relationship between "mind" and "object", and the relationship between "spirit" and "form". There is a lot of discussion in this regard. For example, as Liu Xie pointed out, the idea of poetry lies in "wandering between gods and things"; Xie Zhen said that "scenery is the medium of poetry"; Wang Fuzhi said: "If you can get your heart from the scenery and your spirit from the body, you will have your own well-informed words and participate in the wonders of chemical industry." Until Wang Guowei said that "all landscape words are sentimental words". Empathy for scenery, intention for things, focus on form and implication for images are actually just different manifestations of poetic images in China's traditional poetics.
As hieroglyphics, Chinese characters come from primitive hieroglyphics, such as sun, moon, water, fire, mountains, Sichuan, horses and cattle. Compared with western phonetic symbols, Chinese characters have a natural connection with poetic images, and some people even put forward "word thinking" on this basis. However, Chinese characters, as hieroglyphics, have been gradually abstracted in the long-term evolution. Among the six ways of word formation: referring to things, pictographic characters, pictophonetic characters, cognition, diversion and excuses, the proportion of pictographic characters is getting smaller and smaller. Modern Chinese characters have become a set of pure semantic symbols. Therefore, the image expression of poetry mainly depends on the text of the object, not on the image of the text itself. Nevertheless, the remaining pictographic features of Chinese characters contribute to the image expression of poetry. Pound (1885- 1972), an American poet who praised China's classical poetry, once lamented: "Chinese composed of hieroglyphs is always poetic, and it cannot but be poetic. On the contrary, a large line of English words is not easy to become poetry. "
It is said that image art was not "exported" to the west until the beginning of the twentieth century. As a leading figure of Imagism, Pound, through reading and translating China's classical poems, found that "China poets never express their views directly, but express everything through images", thus realizing the art of images. In the west, although the theory and practice of Imagism are heterogeneous and non-mainstream, imagist poetry in a broad sense can be said to have existed since ancient times. "This ability to create images will always be the symbol of the poet. There are many similes in Homer's poems. Aristotle first pointed out that metaphor is the basis of poetry. " (5) The so-called simile or metaphor means figurative image, so-called figurative image. Hegel's definition of beauty and art is also related to the image theory of poetry: "Beauty is the perceptual manifestation of ideas." "The content of art is the concept, and the form of art is the image of appealing to the senses. Art should reconcile these two aspects into a free and unified whole. " (6)
The so-called "China poets express everything through images" is only applicable to poems with images (pure image poems), but not to poems with outspoken meanings (embellished image poems). China's poems are expressed in two basic ways: conception and direct expression. The latter is actually a direct expression of their own thoughts, just embellishing some images. Pound said: "The main point of Imagism is not to decorate with images." In a poem that tells the truth, the function of image lies in ornament and decoration. Pound admired only one of the expressive methods of China's poems. He only knew one of them, but he didn't know the other. However, mainstream western poetics only knows one of them, but not the other. This is also the reason why Pound's Imagism is regarded as different in the West.
Images usually refer to natural images, that is, objects taken from nature to express their feelings. The images in many famous ancient poems, such as "wildfire never quite consumes them, the spring breeze blows high", "Autumn wind blows my heart, Chang 'an is full of fallen leaves" and "Spring can't close the garden, an almond comes out of the wall", are all natural images.
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.