SOURCE: “Images” in Word, Sound, and Image in the Odes of Horace, The University of Michigan Press, 1969, pp. 47-58.

In the following excerpt, Lee examines Horace's use of imagery, particularly the “frightful realism” of his death-connoting images.

“The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor, and this is the one thing that cannot be learned from others.”

—Aristotle

Poetry never explains. It simply presents us with rhythmed words. Yet when we have examined the words and sounds in a poem we have not reached its inner life, or touched on the process in the poet that produced the poem. There is still the image.

Poets are image-makers. They speak, not with the conventional logic of the prose-writer, but with the special logic of the imagination. They present us, not with carefully reasoned statements, but with images in verse. Ezra Pound defines the image as...