Imagery is like a tour guide the poet hires to help show the reader around his or her poem. This tour guide points out things along the journey, like the way something looks or sounds, and maybe even why it looks and sounds that way. The tour guide should have a lot to do, helping the reader to see the “Kodak moments” in the poem; if the tour guide is off drinking coffee and flirting with the tourists, you may have some work to do with imagery!

An image is a “picture” a poet creates for the reader. The “picture” is not always visual, but it should be sensory, meaning that a poet uses one or more of the five senses to create images that should, in turn, invoke a sensual response in the reader. Our only contact with the world beyond ourselves is through our senses; a poet using sensory images in a poem indeed wields a powerful tool.

Poet William Carlos Williams said that there are “No ideas but in things.” Williams meant that the things of our world, nouns, should comprise a good part of a poem, not ideas. You can’t see, touch, hear, smell, or taste an idea, can you? Can you touch, hear, or taste suffering, happiness, or love? These are concepts—ideas—that hold various associations for the reader. Why leave the associations to chance? Some readers might associate suffering with war, while others might associate it with running out of pistachio ice cream. Which of these do you mean? You lead the reader to your poem’s intention by showing what you mean with images.

You may have heard the phrase “show, don’t tell” if you’ve ever been in a writing workshop. Perhaps you’ve presented a poem to a workshop or a friend and they thought your poem was about fishing at high tide on Miami Beach, when you intended the poem to be about the mating rituals of Barn Owls. What went wrong? It’s possible you didn’t use any imagery at all or you weren’t specific enough in your use of it. Imagery helps the reader understand your poem by remembering through their senses. For a good poet creating good images, a thing can equal an idea. After all, you are writing about something—probably an idea or concept. You will show it through images.

The more abstract your concept for the poem, the more precise your imagery should be. Here’s a poem by Emily Dickinson that uses an abstraction, “hope,” as the concept for the poem, but uses bird imagery to make “hope” concrete and tangible. “Hope” takes on the properties of a bird, and Dickinson has done her job—you will not mistake “hope” for anything else.

Even if your poem relies heavily on ideas, you are obligated to help your reader understand your poem. You are not the maker of puzzles. If you want to confuse people, go to work for the government. If your reader is baffled, you’ve not done your job as a poet. One precise image is worth pages and pages of ideas.

Literal images mean that the poet describes a thing itself, literally, as he or she perceives it. For example, “The granite boulder, half buried in the red clay soil” is a literal description of the stone and its locale.

Figurative images mean that the poet likens the thing he or she is describing to something else, usually using a metaphor or simile. For example, “The pigeon-colored boulder, buried like a gravestone in the ruddy earth.” Here, the stone is compared loosely to a pigeon and to a gravestone, and the word “ruddy” implies “blood.” A figurative image can often hold more associations than a literal image.

Abstractions are those words that have huge meanings that we can’t easily perceive and sometimes can’t even define: love, death, hope, anger, pain, sorrow, etc. Nothing is specifically sensory about these words—their meanings are large and leave a lot to interpretation.

Concrete words are things that we can perceive with our senses: beach ball, schnauzer, rain, light bulb, watermelon, thermometer. We can see, feel, hear, smell, and taste these things (please don’t taste a schnauzer!).

Abstractions may be necessary in order for you to compose your poem. However, long strings of abstractions are tiresome, and do not serve your poem well. Because they mean so much, they are essentially meaningless in your poem; the reader will place his or her associations onto the abstraction and your intention may be lost. Poetry is about precision, and abstractions are anything but precise.

Try to use a variety of concrete images in your poems. A poem with a multitude of sensory images is a delight to read, while a poem relying heavily on abstractions is a bore.

You probably learned in kindergarten about the five senses: sight, touch, taste, smell, and hearing. These are the tools you use to create your images. Beginning poets often choose one or two of the senses, while neglecting the others. Try to use all of them if you can (but not necessarily every one in each poem!).

Since, for most of us, sight is the primary sense we use to navigate the world, it follows naturally that most poets use a lot of visual imagery in their poems. Visual imagery describes how something looks, and enables the reader to visualize the objects or actions in a poem. Here’s a poem by William Carlos Williams that uses a solitary visual image as its primary strategy:

In this poem, Williams paints a word-portrait of the wheelbarrow for the reader. Can you imagine what the rest of the scene looks like? Could you draw a picture of it?

Auditory imagery tries to capture a sound on paper, usually using a comparison to do so. The following poem by William Butler Yeats uses at least one auditory image or description in each of the stanzas, and ends the poem with a culmination of all of these sounds, which he imagines he “hears” in his heart. Isn’t it lovely to be a poet?

Tactile imagery describes how something, even something intangible, feels, either to touch or to experience with the whole body. Tactile imagery can also describe a spiritual experience. Using descriptive, tactile words like wet, cold, sweltering, and heavy, for instance, enables the reader to experience these things in your poems.

This example from Walt Whitman also helps you to imagine how something feels through its descriptive language.

Olfactory images describe how something smells. It’s easy to disregard this sense, so try to work it into your poems if you can. Use your imagination! If want to attach a smell to something intangible, or something you haven’t smelled before, make it up! Here’s how poet Catherine Bowman used this sense in her work:

Edgar Lee Masters’ use of language conjures up the smell of death during war:

Here’s another great example of olfactory imagery from Catherine Bowman:

Taste is another often-overlooked sense you can try to work into your poems.

And another by Elizabeth Barrett Browning shows yet another way to use the sense of taste …

Synesthesia combines two senses together, as in “a velvety voice,” “sparkling silence,” or being able to taste a color, as in “the sharp taste of yellow on my tongue.”

Emily Dickinson wrote, “To the bugle every color is red.” Poets like to use synesthesia because it adds “umph” to an image—synesthesia is imagery intensified. Here are a few examples:

Beginning poets often have a difficult time with imagery because they think that their poems have to be complicated and mysterious; they feel that a poem easily understood is not a poem. Unfortunately, such a technique—however well-intentioned—tends to lead to some pretty bad poetry!

To create an image, begin with the central thing or idea itself. Say you want to describe an animal the way poet Elizabeth Bishop does in her poem, “The Fish.” Bishop describes the skin of the fish as hanging in strips “like ancient wallpaper.” What if Bishop wrote, “the skin of the fish was kind of peeling”? Sure, that’s visual, but it’s not as precise as “ancient wallpaper.”

Here’s a poem by Walt Whitman that uses concrete imagery, nouns, the things of the world. Try to imagine this poem without them:

Concrete imagery is precise imagery. Instead of “vegetable,” Whitman writes “tomato”; instead of “egg,” he writes “egg out of a robin’s nest.” If he simply wrote egg, one reader might think of a chicken’s egg and another reader might think of an ostrich’s egg. Whitman knew that the only way to make his reader understand egg was to name it precisely.

Say this word to yourself: fruit. What did you imagine? Some of you probably imagined bananas, while others imagined plums. The word “fruit” is imprecise. However, we can see, touch, taste, smell, and hear (the peeling of) “banana.” That’s how you want to create your images. Think: bananas. Or plums.

Here are a few exercises to get you thinking about imagery: