What "imagery" means in literature

A term you'll meet in figurative language.

Imagery is the use of vivid descriptive language that engages a reader's senses. It is one of the first literary terms taught in school and one of the most often misunderstood. The standard high-school definition — "imagery makes mental pictures" — covers only one of the five senses and misses what the term is actually doing.

The five kinds of imagery

Imagery is conventionally divided by the sense it engages:

Visual imagery — appeals to sight. "The green light at the end of Daisy's dock."
Auditory imagery — appeals to hearing. "The cracked church bell over the village." Onomatopoeia is a special case of auditory imagery.
Tactile imagery — appeals to touch. "The rough wool of the army blanket."
Olfactory imagery — appeals to smell. Proust's madeleine, the entire opening of Perfume by Süskind.
Gustatory imagery — appeals to taste. "The metallic tang of fear in her mouth."

Two more sometimes added: kinesthetic imagery (appealing to bodily movement and tension) and organic imagery (appealing to internal sensations like hunger or nausea).

Why "mental pictures" is misleading

Reducing imagery to "mental pictures" makes three mistakes. First, it privileges sight over the other senses; many of the most powerful images in literature are not visual. Second, it makes imagery sound passive — a kind of mental slide projector — when in fact imagery is doing argumentative work. Third, it implies that the image is the goal, when usually the image is the vehicle for a feeling, an idea, or a thematic claim.

Imagery vs. figurative language vs. symbol

The relationships:

Imagery is the broad term — any sensory description.
Figurative language (metaphor, simile, personification) is one way to produce imagery, but not the only way; a literal description can be imagistic too.
Symbol is an image with sustained, often allegorical meaning. The green light in Gatsby is both an image and a symbol; the rain in a battle scene might just be imagery.

The Imagist movement

In the 1910s, a group of Anglo-American poets — Ezra Pound, H. D., Amy Lowell, F. S. Flint — formed a school called Imagism with a manifesto-like commitment to direct treatment of the "thing," economy of language, and the musical phrase. Pound's famous "In a Station of the Metro" is the canonical Imagist poem:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Two lines, one juxtaposed image, no explanatory framework. The Imagists' commitment to spare, sensory writing reshaped twentieth-century poetry — even when later poets reacted against it.

Why writers use it

Imagery makes the abstract concrete. A philosopher arguing "alienation is the modern condition" requires the reader to believe the proposition. A novelist describing the protagonist sitting in an empty subway car at 4 a.m., watching her own reflection in the dark window, has communicated alienation without arguing for it. Imagery is the writer's way of making the reader experience the thing rather than be told about it.

How to read it in context

When a passage seems to be doing nothing but describing something at length, ask which senses are being engaged and why those particular ones. The selection of detail is the writer's argument. A war scene that emphasizes smell rather than sight is making a different claim than one that emphasizes the visual. Imagery is rarely neutral; the senses the writer chooses to foreground are the senses they want you to inhabit.

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