imagery

In the chapter “Imagery”, Mary Oliver goes over the basics of imagery. Initially, Oliver states that imagery is one of the key concepts of imagery that helps deepen the meaning and reveal the poem to the reader. To be quite honest, throughout this chapter, Oliver essentially repeated information that we had already known about for the most part, yet it was a nice refresher to go over the material. All of us know what simile and metaphor are by this time of the year and when Oliver goes over this section, I was quite bored (except for the part where she mentioned what an extended metaphor meant as I was not very sure as to what it stood for). The review over personification and allusion were somewhat interesting as I leant some new information.

Something that I have to disagree with what Oliver said is that one should not try personification if it is bad or silly. Doesn’t this contradict what “try try till you succeed” If one does not use personification because they feel that it is too basic or foolish, then the person is inhibiting their ability to learn. Poetry, in my opinion, is a trial and error process where you keep trying and learning from criticism and feedback. If you don’t write a personification at all, then you are not really improving your poem or your poetry skills. I personally feel that personification is very important in poetry and I only wish that I was good at incorporating it in the poems that I try to write, yet I can’t really come up with a form of personification all the time.