On the Image of Poetry

Image theory has a long history in China, but looking at the ancient poetry theory, the use of the word image in ancient China is often inconsistent. The study of poetic images is not thorough enough, and there is almost no special and comprehensive discussion. It is an important subject of contemporary poetics to accurately define the concept of poetic image and deeply explore its generation and characteristics. So, what is the image of poetry? Poetry image is the object presented in poetry works and the object of the poet's spiritualization. The objective image enters the poet's mind, and after the choice, elutriation and processing of the poet's aesthetic experience, it permeates the poet's interest and ideal, and it is idle to enter the poem. It is the artistic crystallization of the combination of subjective feeling and objective image. For example, Wang Anshi has two famous sentences about plum blossoms: "A few plums in a corner, hanling alone." Plum blossom is an objective and external thing, and it has no humanity. Now it is a lonely corner, open alone, with a feeling of elegance and detachment, and this plum blossom has become a wonderful image in the poem.

As the poet Ai Qing said, "Image is a concrete feeling." It is a kind of sensory impression, which is captured by the poet with the hand of feeling and appealed to the image of feeling.

Image is one of the basic conditions of poetry. Conceptually, image is the symbolic element of the poet's thinking in images. It can be said that it is the process that the poet seeks, projects, shapes and combines images in the realm of imagination under the impetus of emotion. This process is often the first image that comes out of inspiration, becomes the core image, and then connects with other images, continues, and finally combines. In the finished product of creation, image is the basic unit of poetry content. When people talk about the content of the work, they often use the metaphor of colored thread piercing the pearl. From a specific point of view, the content of a poem is usually a group of images that the poet's dominant emotion runs through, and each image is closely related to the gain and loss of the work. In poetry appreciation, image is one of the most active activating factors. Readers are first stimulated by images, and restore, supplement and recreate the images in the poem into their own images, and then combine the images into the images or artistic conception of the poem.