James Longenbach: Image, Figure, Sound (January 2016)

Poems and novels are made of words: why have we become accustomed to saying that poems contain images or are constructed out of images? Like what we call a voice, what we call an image is a second-order craft element, one that is constructed out of the more primary linguistic materials of diction, metaphor, rhythm, and syntax. Drawing upon work by Shakespeare, Pound, Susan Howe, and others, Longenbach explores how our vocabulary of image uses visual language to account for a linguistic effect.