Imagery and Specificity

A lecture by Jonathan McClure

Overview and Goals — 0:00:01

The received wisdom—be concrete, be specific, avoid abstractions—is largely correct. But it’s worth looking more carefully at how specific imagery actually works in practice: what it does and how, when piling on images is the right move and when a few well-chosen ones are enough, and whether there are cases where abstraction can work despite the conventional wisdom against it.

Today’s session looks at three categories of poems: those that lean heavily into dense, specific imagery; those that select a few anchor images and let those carry the weight; and a counterexample or two that operate mostly through abstraction and still manage to succeed. One participant flagged a recurring question: not whether to use imagery, but how to know when you’ve gone overboard. That tension runs through the whole discussion.

Dense Imagery as the Engine: Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish” — 0:04:00

Bishop catches a tremendous fish, holds it beside the boat, looks at it very closely for a long time, and lets it go. The poem is the looking.

The fish is described in extraordinary detail: brown skin hanging in strips like ancient wallpaper, barnacles and sea lice, gills breathing what she calls the terrible oxygen, flesh packed in like feathers, bones, entrails, a pink swim bladder like a big peony. His eyes are backed and packed with “tarnished tinfoil seen through the lenses of old, scratched isinglass.” And then she notices five old pieces of fish-line hanging from his lower lip, with five hooks still embedded in his jaw—medals, she calls them, with ribbons frayed and wavering.

The act of sustained attention is what the poem is about. An imagined stripped-down version—I caught a fish, noticed he’d been caught before, felt bad, let him go—conveys the same information and does nothing. You don’t experience anything alongside her. The whole force of the poem comes from being brought along through the close observation, moment by moment, and feeling the relationship between speaker and fish shift as she looks more carefully.

Several things to notice in how the imagery works:

The description moves inward progressively—skin first, then barnacles and sea lice, then gills, then what she imagines of the interior. This trajectory of attention is itself part of the meaning: she’s getting closer, penetrating further, relating more.

The images carry implied story. The five old hooks mean he has survived five previous catches. She doesn’t say this; we understand it. The speaker’s relationship to the fish quietly shifts—from trophy to fellow survivor—without being announced.

Images double back on themselves in a way that feels like thought in motion. Ancient wallpaper becomes wallpaper again in the next breath; the meditation loops rather than progresses. This is what thought actually does, and it creates the sense that we’re watching the speaker’s mind rather than receiving a finished conclusion.

Bishop is also careful to walk back her anthropomorphizations. When she says the fish’s eyes shifted, she immediately qualifies: “not to return my stare. It was more like the tipping of an object toward the light.” The speaker notices the impulse to see kinship and then corrects herself—and this correction is part of what makes the eventual moment of letting the fish go feel earned rather than sentimental.

The final image—rainbow everywhere, from a pool of oil around a rusted engine—is ugly and beautiful at once. Not unlike the fish. One participant described it as exaltation: paying this quality of attention to something is already a form of reverence, even before the explicit decision to let it go.

A Few Well-Chosen Images: Robert Hass’s “Envy of Other People’s Poems” — 0:37:00

A very different approach. The poem reimagines the Sirens myth: in this version, there is no song. The Sirens couldn’t sing. Odysseus, lashed to the mast, hears wind and birds and the sound of the sea, and his imagination supplies the rest. The mute women are just gathering kelp for garden mulch, going about their day, while he strains against the ropes.

The poem is not trying to overwhelm you with imagery. It picks a small number of things and lets those do the work: the offshore hunger of the birds, the kelp being gathered for garden mulch (the least glamorous possible thing), him straining against the cordage, the rocky waste of island. Each image earns its place precisely because each one does something specific.

The kelp image is a good example of the principle that a well-chosen image does more than one thing at once: it conveys the barrenness and ordinariness of the Sirens’ lives (they’re just doing chores), it undercuts any romantic notion of them as supernatural predators, and it creates a contrast with the epic scale of Odysseus’s suffering that is quietly funny.

One participant observed that the poem feels balanced rather than heavy—the images, the humor, the allusion, and the argument all seem to be in proportion. Nothing overwhelms anything else.

A Counterexample: Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse” — 0:46:00

There is almost no imagery in this poem. The vocabulary is abstract: faults, misery, happiness. What imagery there is—old-fashioned hats and coats as shorthand for a stuffy past, the coastal shelf—is spare and not particularly vivid. The poem’s argument is maximally general: your parents ruined you, their parents ruined them, get out early and don’t have kids.

By the usual logic, this should fail. And it would fail if you removed its two other engines: the bouncy iambic tetrameter and the insistent rhyme. The meter drives you forward like a nursery rhyme—da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM—and the rhyme keeps snapping the couplets shut. The clash between that cheerful, childlike form and the over-the-top nihilism of the content is the poem. If you delivered the same argument in bleak free verse, the response would probably be: dude, relax. The form creates the necessary distance, keeps it funny, prevents it from collapsing into mere bitter complaint.

The lesson isn’t that imagery doesn’t matter; it’s that a poem doesn’t need imagery if it has something else doing equivalent work. Here, sound and form carry the weight that specificity would carry elsewhere. The abstraction is almost the point—the poem is making a sweeping universal claim about human suffering, and very specific images would actually undermine that ambition.

One participant pushed back: even here, the images that do appear carry weight. At each other’s throats is vivid and slightly violent; the coastal shelf deepens as we sit with it. Almost nothing can sustain total abstraction. The real question is what proportion of weight each element is being asked to bear.

Sound as Imagery: Seamus Heaney’s “Death of a Naturalist” — 0:53:00

If Bishop uses close visual description, Heaney uses imagery that is equally dense but also saturated with sound. A childhood memory of gathering frogspawn from a flax dam—green, rotting, festering, alive with insects. The imagery is deliberately unpleasant: bubbles gargled delicately, warm thick slobber of frogspawn, clotted water in the shade of the banks. The child finds all of this marvelous. He fills jam pots with jellied specks. Miss Walls explains that the daddy frog croaks and the mammy frog lays eggs; you can tell the weather from the color of the frogs.

Then comes the turn. One hot day, the flax dam fills with angry frogs. Gross-bellied frogs cocked on sods, their loose necks pulsed like snails. Some sat poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting. The child flees. The frogs, in his imagination, have gathered for vengeance.

The sonic texture of the poem reinforces its visual texture throughout. Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods has an internal rhyme that sounds heavy and waterlogged. A strong gauze of sound around the smell—the rhyme makes the sound feel thick, like the air. Bubbles gargled delicately is funny precisely because delicacy and gargling are incompatible.

The structure mirrors the content: the first section is recursive, looping—the child keeps circling back to the same images, adding details, in the way a fascinated child’s attention actually works. The second section is more linear, event-driven—he sees the frogs, he runs. The child’s perspective changes, and so does the syntax.

The title names what is lost: his career as a naturalist, his childhood fascination with the gross and the living. The adult speaker presumably knows that the frogs weren’t gathering for vengeance. The child didn’t know that, and the poem makes us feel both the child’s fear and the adult’s wry affection for it.

Specificity Without Visual Imagery — 1:02:00

A final example that doesn’t quite fit the other categories: a poem about a speaker who is not religious but has been receiving visits from God and an under-qualified angel. The speaker tries to bribe God with wedding cake, money, candy, marijuana. Suggests setting up a booth so that anyone who wants to talk to God can do so without “the stuffy house of worship, the stuffier middlemen, and the football blimps that accidentally intercept prayers on their way to heaven.” Eventually God and the speaker play backgammon and use their indoor voices. When the speaker asks about the afterlife, God says Oh, that, and then sends the junior angel, who says nothing, and neither God nor the angel is heard from again.

The poem doesn’t use much visual imagery—you couldn’t point to sustained description in the way you could with Bishop or Heaney. What it uses instead is an accumulation of very specific details: the angel who sounds like an unpaid intern in their early twenties, proficient only at fetching coffee and sending vague emails; the specific denominations of the bribe; the backgammon game with indoor voices. None of these are descriptive. But together they build an extremely precise portrait of the speaker’s relationship to religion—skeptical, slightly superstitious, ultimately fond—and of a universe in which God is real but also somewhat ineffectual and has the social manner of someone who doesn’t take hints well.

The ending is characteristic of what this accumulation achieves. The speaker misses God and the angel “like creatures I made up or found in a book and then got to know a bit.” A confession of ambivalence about something the speaker claims not to believe in, expressed through the most offhand possible phrasing.

Closing Thoughts — 1:10:00

The principle isn’t that more imagery is always better, or that abstraction is always to be avoided. It’s that every element of a poem needs to be doing work—earning its place. Dense imagery works when the act of detailed attention is itself the subject, or when the accumulation creates a texture the meaning depends on. Selective imagery works when a few things, chosen well, can anchor the poem and let the argument breathe around them. Abstraction can work when something else—sound, form, humor, accumulated specificity of a different kind—is carrying equivalent weight.

The question to ask of any description: if this weren’t here, would I lose something? If the hair color doesn’t matter, don’t mention the hair. If it does matter, make us feel why.