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. "The so-called simile or metaphor, that is, figurative image, is called metaphor (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. "
"Image" is an important concept in China's ancient literary theory. 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. The author has a feeling for external things, so he entrusts it to a selected specific object, so that it can be integrated into the author's own sense of color, creating a specific artistic world, allowing readers to make a second creation in their hearts according to this artistic world when reading poems, and infiltrating their own sense of color on the basis of restoring what the poet sees and feels.
Images usually refer to natural images, that is, objects taken from nature to express their feelings. Many famous ancient poems, such as "the mountain fire never dies, the spring breeze blows high" and "the autumn wind blows the Weihe River, and the leaves are full of Chang 'an". (Jia Dao's Yishui Poetry) and "Spring can't close the garden, an apricot is out of the wall" are both 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.
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 is a faint crow and the small bridge is a flowing water family", the dead vine, the old tree, the faint crow, the small bridge, the flowing water and the family are all images in the poem. When these images are combined together, they become a sad and sad artistic conception. Image is concrete, artistic conception is the combination of the overall environment and feelings composed of concrete things, and feelings are pinned on the scenery.
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 word-forming methods, namely, referring to things, pictographic characters, pictographic characters, knowing, transferring notes and making excuses, the proportion of pictographic characters is getting smaller and smaller due to the increasing richness of Chinese characters. Modern Chinese character system is more complex and complete, and its expressive force is stronger. 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. "