I'm searching for an equivalent to the word "image" as applied to poetry, which is not limited to the sense of a visual picture or illustration.

What I'm thinking of is the way a poem indicates, points toward something, by way of suggestion or allusion or evocation. That "something" may be a physical thing or an idea; but what the poem does is offer a verbal embodiment or gesture or narrative.

In painting, the wholeness of an image is valued (the way the parts of a picture are subordinate to or supportive of an integrated whole): the painting projects a unified image, something the viewer can grasp as such.

If there is something similar in poetry, we would have a verbal embodiment as a kind of accessible or recognizable whole: there would be a substance (intellectual, sensible) imparted by the poem to the reader.

Some poems impart that substance purely through harmonics. That is, there may not be much of a visual element at all; the verbal formulation may be abstract and discursive; but the language may work through its harmonics to create this kind of embodiment, which I'm relating to the idea of "image". Sound, rhythm, and diction alone may create this harmonic envelope.

Yeats was very interested in this notion of poetic holism, the formation of images which are both exact and precise, on the one hand, and full of open implication, on the other, and the holism of the entire poem, and groups of poems (see good book by Engelberg[?], The Vast Design).

I'm interested in how "embodiment" - whether through actual visual images, or through allusive, evocative language - lends itself to natural vision & sensation, returning the poem to the ground of ordinary experience. A poem's finish or fitness would seem to have a lot to do with its capacity to transfer a complete embodiment or image from poem to reader.

And it seems that these concerns are not emphasized in poetry much these days : there's more focus on baroque distortions of diction and syntax, jarring juxtapositions or rhetorical exaggeration for effect (I know there's a term for this out there... - catachresis, I thought of it!), the dilemmas of undecideability. These all seem like surface phenomena. There's less focus on holistic embodiment and its transferences, and more on immediacy, shock, surprise.