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“Art is thinking in images.” This phrase, which you can hear even from a grammar school student, is nevertheless a starting point for the scientific philologist who is beginning to formulate something in literary theory. The idea has entered into the consciousness of many and according to Potebnya, who is one of its originators, “There is no art, especially no poetry, without imagery.” And: “Poetry, like prose, is first and foremost a mode of thinking and knowing.”
Poetry is a special mode of thinking—to be exact, a mode of thinking in images. This mode entails a certain economy of mental effort, “a feeling of the relative ease of the process,” and this economy reflexively evokes an aesthetic sensation. Apparently this is how the academician Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky, who undoubtedly read the books of Potebnya, understood and summarized the ideas of his teacher. Potebnya and his numerous followers consider poetry to be a special kind of thinking—thinking with the help of images—and the purpose of imagery, according to them, is to help organize different objects and actions into groups in order to explain the unknown by means of the known. Or, in Potebnya’s words:
The relationship of the image to what is being explained is that:
a) the image serves as a constant predicate for ever-changing subjects—a constant means for attracting variable apperceptives . . .
b) the image is far simpler and clearer than what it explains.
In other words, “since the purpose of imagery is to bring the meaning of the image closer to our understanding and since without it imagery has no meaning, the image ought to be better known to us than that which is explained by it.” It would be interesting to apply this principle to Tyutchev’s comparison of lightnings to deaf and dumb demons, or Gogol’s comparison of the sky to God’s mantle.
“There is no art without imagery.” “Art is thinking in images.” These maxims have led to monstrous stretches in interpretation;—music, architecture, and lyric poetry have all been viewed as thought in imagery. After a quarter of a century of effort Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky had to finally recognize music, architecture, and lyric poetry as a special class of imageless art and to define them as lyrical arts appealing directly to the emotions. And so it has turned out that a large area of art is not a mode of thinking. One of the them, however, lyric poetry (in the narrow sense), is quite like “imagistic” art: it treats words in a similar fashion and, what is more important, imagistic art turns quite unnoticeably into imageless art, and yet our perceptions of them are alike.
But the definition “Art is thinking in images,” which means (I am omitting the intermediary elements of the well-known equations) that art primarily creates symbols, still persists, having survived the collapse of the theory on which it was based. It mainly thrives in the Symbolist movement, especially among its theorists.
Thus, many still believe that thinking in images (“roads and shadows,” “furrows and ridges”) is the main characteristic of poetry. Consequently, they should have expected the history of this so-called “imagistic” art to consist of changing imagery. It turns out, however, that images are virtually fixed; they pass from century to century, from country to country, from poet to poet with almost no changes. Images “belong to no one,” they “belong to God.” The more you try to understand an epoch, the more convinced you become that the images you thought were created by a given poet were taken almost unchanged from others. The work of poetic schools evolves around collecting and discovering new devices for the arrangement and development of verbal material, and they are more concerned with arranging images, in particular, than creating them. Images are given; poets do not think in images as much as remember them.
Imagistic thought is not, in any case, something that unites all types of art or even all types of verbal art. And a change in imagery is not essential to the dynamics of poetry.
We know of instances where an expression was perceived to be poetic, created for aesthetic pleasure, but in fact it was created with no such intention. Take, for example, Innokenti Annensky’s opinion that the Slavonic language is especially poetic, or Andrei Bely’s delight in the practice of placing adjectives after nouns by the eighteenth-century Russian poets. Bely delights in this as in something inherently artistic, or, more precisely, as intended and therefore artistic. In reality, it is a general feature of the given language (the influence of Old Church Slavonic). Thus, a work may be: (1) intended to be prosaic and experienced as poetic, or (2) intended to be poetic and experienced as prosaic. This suggests that the artistic quality attributed to a given work results from the way we perceive it. By works of art, in the narrow sense, we shall mean things created through special devices designed to make them as obviously artistic as possible.
Potebnya’s conclusion, which can be formulated as “poetry = imagery,” gave rise to the whole theory that “imagery = symbolism,” that the image may serve as the invariable predicate of various subjects. (This conclusion that underlies the foundation of Symbolist theory has attracted, by virtue of its kinship of ideas, such Symbolists as Andrei Bely and Dmitri Merezhkovsky with his Eternal Companions). The conclusion stems partly from the fact that Potebnya did not distinguish between the language of poetry and the language of prose. Consequently, he failed to notice that there are two types of imagery: (a) imagery as a practical means for thinking, a means for organizing things into groups, and (b) poetic imagery as a means for intensifying an impression. Here is an example for clarification. I am walking on the street and see a man in a hat walking in front of me who drops a package. I call after him: “Hey hat, you lost a package!” This is a purely prosaic trope. Here is another example. Several men are standing at attention. The commander notices that one of the men is standing awkwardly and yells at him: “Hey hat, watch how you’re standing!” This is a poetic trope. (In the first case, the word “hat” is a metonymy, in the second case it is a metaphor. But what interests me here is something else.) A poetic image is a means for creating the strongest possible impression. It has the same function as other poetic devices such as regular and negative parallelisms, comparison, repetition, symmetry, hyperbole, the commonly accepted rhetorical figures, and all other figures of speech that amplify the sensation of things (such as the words or even the sounds of a literary work). But the poetic image is comparable to the image-fable or image-thought only externally, as, for example, when a little girl calls a round sphere a watermelon (in Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky’s Language and Art). The poetic image is but one of the means of poetic language. The prosaic image is a means for abstraction: a watermelon instead of a round lampshade or a watermelon instead of a head is only the abstraction of one of the object’s characteristics and is not any different from “head = sphere” or “watermelon = sphere.” This, too, is a mode of thinking, but it has nothing to do with poetry.
