ABSTRACT
This chapter primarily concerns the evolution of assumptions relating to the image of poetry, describes this image in a new way, and suggests new ways of looking at contingent issues, in poetry and criticism. The artist’s devotion to the Image developed at the same time as the modern industrial state and the modern middle class. The Image is the reward of that agonising difference; isolated in the city, the poet is a ‘seer’. The Image, for all its concretion, precision, and oneness, is desperately difficult to communicate, and has for that reason alone as much to do with the alienation of the seer as the necessity of his existing in the midst of a hostile society. Baudelaire is a famous case, but there is nothing specifically French about his difficulties, and these notions of Image and isolation developed independently in England, from native Romantic roots.
