Abstract
During the twentieth century poets and critics alike have paid more attention to imagery than to any other element of poetry. But this attention is only one manifestation of a great modern interest in the image. The last century has seen an ever-increasing image-consciousness in religion, philosophy, anthropology and related sciences, literature, and the arts. Nevertheless, the image, deriving its efficacy from the composite nature of man, has played an important role in the life of man from primitive times. Although attacks on the image as a mode of apprehension and expression were made from time to time, notably in the iconoclasm of the eighth and ninth centuries, the image remained securely established in western man’s society, religion, and literature until the seventeenth century. At that time it suffered a severe dislodging. Various writers have tried to determine the cause of this banishment of the image. They have proposed a number of possible causes, among them the influence of Bacon and the new science, the renunciation of ritual and liturgies as well as liturgical art in the Reformation, the rebirth of skepticism, the philosophy of Descartes with its mechanistic view of the world, the social and political revolution with its trend toward democracy and the abandonment of ceremonial. Malcolm Mackenzie Ross has recently suggested another solution. He believes that the Reformation did more than simply reject liturgical ceremonial and traditional symbolic art. In the Protestant revision of Eucharistic dogma, he says, the whole sacramental grip on reality and the idea of sanctification of natural things were repudiated. The result was the destruction of the analogical validity of the poetic symbol.