One goal of a poet is to make abstract, universal concepts--love, hate, birth, death--concrete. In other words, you want to individualize abstract concepts; you need to personalize your experiences. Everyone is familiar with such concepts, but they are not familiar with your observation of or participation in the events relative to the concepts. To make an emotion or event sensible, you must create images. The following poem ("The Red Wheelbarrow" 1923) by William Carlos Williams underscores the importance of imagery in poetry.
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.*
What depends on a wet wheelbarrow near some chickens? Literally the poem relies on it; figuratively poetry relies on imagery. Williams describes an ordinary object and makes a statement about the nature of poetry. It is significant that the listener/reader realizes an otherwise useful object as art, which is a response to Immanuel Kant's aesthetic. The diction and syntax are similar to natural speech, and the short lines offer less information than traditional verse. However, less is more in this case, for the poem gains momentum through enjambment, and such enjambment intensifies the importance of each noun at the ends of the second, third and fourth stanzas. The poem depends on the fragmentary images that the speaker connects in an elliptical way.
Another way to make an emotion or event sensible is to compare it to things that are inherently similar to each other. Describe the things, using different avenues of sensation. You do not want to compare the emotion or event to disparate things--things made of fundamentally different and often incongruous elements, things markedly distinct in quality or character. Rather, you want to extend the initial comparison to similar things. For example, if I were to describe my love for my girlfriend via comparison to a blouse (attraction based on appearance), I would extend the initial comparison to a sail (longing) then to sheets (sexual attraction). Fabric is the common thread, the fundamental vehicle of comparison. Of course, I may irritate my girlfriend like a wool sweater chafes skin and find myself alone and naked beneath a streetlight.
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*Charles Tomlinson
, ed., Selected Poems, by William Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions, 1985) 56.
