What Is Imagery? 7 Types of Sensory Imagery With Examples

What is imagery?

In literature, imagery is a text's way of bringing something seen, heard, smelled, tasted or touched to life in the reader's mind. A single instance is called an image. In everyday English "imagery" can also mean pictures in general, but in literary criticism it refers to sensory language.

M. H. Abrams and Geoffrey Harpham's glossary of literary terms notes that the meaning of the term is highly variable and distinguishes three common uses:

• Broad sense: all the objects and qualities of sense perception in a work, whether described literally, alluded to, or carried inside a simile. Besides sight, this includes sound, touch, temperature, smell, taste and movement.
• Narrow sense: detailed, concrete description of visible objects and scenes.
• Figurative sense: the images carried by similes and metaphors. According to the glossary, this use came to the fore in criticism after the 1930s.

What the three uses share is that imagery pulls a text from the abstract toward the concrete. This article mostly uses the broad sense.

Types of imagery

Images are grouped by the sense they address. The examples below were written for this article.

The last type needs care. Organic imagery conveys a sensation from inside the body and slides easily into naming an emotion: "her stomach rumbled" is a sensation, while "her heart sank" already names a state of mind. This boundary comes up again below, under the Emotion Embargo.

Imagism: Pound's 1913 definition

In 1913 the word "image" became the name of a movement in English and American poetry. In the March 1913 issue of Poetry, F. S. Flint's "Imagisme" and Ezra Pound's "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste" were published side by side. The first of the three principles Flint reports is "direct treatment of the 'thing'"; the second is to use no word that does not contribute to the presentation. Pound defines the image like this: an image is "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time."

Two details in this definition matter. First, the image does not leave emotion out; it presents emotion within an instant. Second, the word "presents" suggests that the emotion is given together with something, without being named. The idea T. S. Eliot called the "objective correlative" in 1919 points the same way: instead of stating an emotion directly, find an object, a situation or a chain of events that carries it. This historical line of the showing and telling distinction was also covered in the article on objective and subjective description.

From the Objective Projection perspective: imagery and the six dimensions

Types of imagery and the method's dimensions

Objective Projection proposes encoding emotion through physical detail instead of naming it with a label, and uses six dimensions when planning a scene. These dimensions are planning and labelling tools; they are not a claim about the reader's body. Their closest counterparts among the types of imagery are as follows:

The table is a suggested mapping, not a one-to-one correspondence. It also shows the most honest result: smell, taste and colour are among the images writers use most, yet they are not among the method's dimensions. That should be recorded as a gap.

Emotion Embargo: the line between sensation and state of mind

The Emotion Embargo asks the narrator not to state an emotion by name. Imagery is the natural tool for this rule, because it gives a sensation without naming the emotion. The line gets thin with organic imagery: "his hands shook" is kinesthetic imagery, while "a shiver ran through her soul" moves toward a state of mind. A practical question helps: could a camera or a microphone record this sentence, or could only the character know it?

Exclusion of Similes and figurative imagery

Abrams's third sense thinks of imagery together with simile and metaphor. Objective Projection's Exclusion of Similes, by contrast, is a method choice that leaves similes out of prose. This choice works only with the broad and narrow senses of imagery; it does not use figurative imagery. That does not mean figurative imagery is bad. In poetry, in humour and in many prose traditions, simile is at the centre of imagery. The method proposes no rule for those areas.

Output Layer: no numbers in imagery

The dimensions can sit in the writer's plan as numbers, but they do not enter the text as numbers. "The room was twelve degrees" is a measurement; "his breath left a mark on the glass" is an image. This principle was explained in detail in the article on the Output Layer.

Example: the same scene twice

The scene below was written for this article; it is not taken from any work. Selin comes home at the end of a long day.

Telling version:

When Selin got home she was very tired and unhappy. The house seemed emptier and sadder to her than ever.

Showing version:

The key went into the lock on the second try. The hallway light came on, went off, came on again. From the kitchen came the burnt smell of the coffee left on the stove that morning. Selin sat down on a chair without taking off her coat; the seat was cold. The fridge motor stopped, and only the ticking of the wall clock was left in the house. At the bottom of the glass on the table was a finger of tea. She took a sip; the tea was bitter. She did not untie her shoelaces.

What is each image doing in the scene?

• Kinesthetic: the key that fits on the second try, the coat that stays on, the laces that stay tied. All three are unfinished movements.
• Visual: the flickering light. The light does not settle once in the scene.
• Olfactory: the burnt coffee left from the morning. The day comes back through a smell.
• Tactile: the cold seat. The house has been left unheated.
• Auditory: the clock heard once the motor stops. Silence is shown through a sound.
• Gustatory: the bitter, cold tea.

The telling version hands the reader the ready-made judgements "tired", "unhappy" and "sad". None of these words appears in the showing version; the reader builds the scene from six sensory images. That the showing version leaves a stronger effect on readers than the telling version is an assumption; it has not been tested.

How to write imagery

1. First check which sense is missing. Most drafts are written with visual imagery only; adding a sound, a smell or a temperature can change the scene.
2. Choose a single object instead of a general word. Not "a messy kitchen" but "the coffee pot left on the stove".
3. Tie the image to a movement. The moment the smell arrives, the moment the sound stops, the moment the light goes out.
4. Ask the camera question. If a camera or a microphone could record the sentence, it is an image; if only the character could know it, it may be naming a state of mind.
5. Turn numbers into detail. Let degrees, metres and seconds stay in the plan; let their seen or heard result enter the text.
6. Choose few images. Adding a sense to every sentence turns a scene into an inventory.

To see the words that name emotions and the similes in your own scene, you can use the Scene Checker; the tool does not count images, it only marks namings and similes. The other tools are on the Objective Projection Tools page.

Imagery, subtext and the world the reader builds

Imagery is not mere decoration; it gives material to the mental picture the reader builds from the text. Cognitive research on the "situation model" a reader builds from a text was summarised in the article on situation models. Suggesting what is left unsaid through imagery is the subject of the subtext technique. For an example from the screen of how space and sound carry a narrative, see the article on Severance. Whether sensory images survive the move from one language to another is a separate question; the article on sensory details in translation treats it as an untested hypothesis.

What the doctrine cannot say here

• It cannot say which type of imagery leaves a stronger effect on readers; there is no reader data on this.
• It proposes no dimension for smell, taste, colour or texture; these are not among the method's six dimensions.
• It cannot say how imagery should be used in poetry or in prose that relies on figurative imagery; the Exclusion of Similes is not a rule for those areas.
• It cannot say how many images in a scene are enough and how many are too many.
• It does not give any work or poet a score, value or measurement.

Limitations

This article rests on a single original example scene, two sources on literary terms and two 1913 texts of the Imagist movement. The mapping between imagery types and the method's dimensions is the author's suggestion; it has not been tested with independent annotators. The example scene has not been tested with readers. The names of imagery types vary between sources (for example "organic" versus "internal" imagery). The article's relation to the method can be seen in Levent Bulut's knowledge graph, and his registered works on the Levent Bulut corpus page.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is imagery in literature?

Imagery is a text's way of bringing something seen, heard, smelled, tasted or touched to life in the reader's mind. A single instance is called an image.

What are the types of imagery?

Images are grouped by the sense they address: visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile, kinesthetic and organic imagery. Organic imagery conveys sensations from inside the body, such as hunger, thirst or fatigue.

Is imagery the same as a simile?

No. Imagery can be literal description; "the seat of the chair was cold" is tactile imagery and contains no simile. Similes and metaphors carry an image through something else; glossaries of literary terms treat this as the figurative sense of imagery.

How did Ezra Pound define the image?

In his piece in the March 1913 issue of Poetry, Pound defines the image as that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. In the same issue F. S. Flint reports the first principle of Imagism as direct treatment of the thing.

How can I show emotion through imagery?

Instead of writing the name of the emotion, choose one detail that is seen, heard or touched at that moment and tie it to a movement. If a camera or a microphone could record the sentence, it is an image; if only the character could know it, it may be naming a state of mind.

References

• Abrams, M. H. and Harpham, G. G. (2015). A Glossary of Literary Terms (11th ed.). Stamford: Cengage Learning. Entry "Imagery".
• Eliot, T. S. (1919). "Hamlet and His Problems". Reprinted in The Sacred Wood (1920).
• Flint, F. S. (March 1913). "Imagisme". Poetry, 1(6).
• Pound, E. (March 1913). "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste". Poetry, 1(6).
• Türk Dil Kurumu. "İmge". Güncel Türkçe Sözlük.

Citation

@misc{bulut2026imagery,
  author       = {Bulut, Levent},
  title        = {Imagery in Literature: Types and Examples},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://leventbulut.com/imagery-in-literature-types-examples/}},
  note         = {leventbulut.com}
}