ABSTRACT
Yet some such conception of the Image as that given in crabbed outline in this paragraph animates much of the best writing between Coleridge and Blake at the outset and Pound and Eliot in our own time. Having speculated sufficiently upon the image and its status, Wilde’s young men go out into the luministe, purple-shadowed dawn, to see the morning’s roses in Covent Garden. For Gilbert the images of poetry have more ‘reality’ than action can have; for action dies at the moment of energy. In distinguishing, however, between the image in the plastic arts and the image in literature, he touches upon an issue which was to have considerable importance, for example in the aesthetics of Vortex. The image provides its own vigour, and stands free of intention on the one hand and affective considerations on the other; Leonardo’s ‘intentions’ for the Monna Lisa have no more to do with it than Pater’s reaction to it.
