Blevins is an essayist and poet who has taught at Hollins University, Sweet Briar College, and in the Virginia Community College system. In this essay, Blevins argues that a study of the discursive mode in Howe's poem reveals that idea, when married to image and music, may bring the beauties of image and music into very sharp focus.

By articulating a preference for the concrete and particular over the abstract, poets like William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound made the image reign supreme in twentieth-century American poetry. A desire "to grasp the fluid, absolutely particular life of the physical world," as the American poet and critic Robert Pinksy says of the modernist preference for the image in The Situation of Poetry, requires a preference for the descriptive mode of discourse. In the descriptive mode, writers avoid abstraction and statement, choosing instead to present feelings, thoughts, observations, and...