What is Imagery? — Definition, Types, and Examples
Imagery definition
Imagery is descriptive language that appeals to the five senses, movement, and internal emotions and feelings. Imagery is not limited to engaging the reader's sense of sight. Instead, imagery uses sensory details to evoke external and internal sensations and makes information more engaging and appealing.
Types of imagery
There are seven main types of imagery: visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile, kinesthetic, and organic.
Visual: Visual imagery is one of the most commonly used forms of imagery in creative writing. It creates a mental image in the reader's mind, allowing them to visualize a writer's descriptions. Visual imagery typically includes qualities such as color, shape, or size.
Auditory: Auditory imagery appeals to a reader's sense of hearing. Authors use onomatopoeia, alliteration, and other literary devices to mimic the effect of sounds.
Olfactory: Olfactory imagery appeals to a reader's sense of smell. Writers incorporate descriptions of smell to help readers understand what characters are experiencing.
Gustatory: Gustatory imagery focuses on a reader's sense of taste. Writers describe common tastes such as sweetness, sour, salty, or spicy in their use of gustatory imagery.
Tactile: Tactile imagery refers to a reader's sense of touch. Most writers focus on temperature, texture, and other typical physical sensations most people experience.
Kinesthetic: Kinesthetic imagery centers around a reader's sense of movement. By describing motions, writers make their characters more realistic and three-dimensional.
Organic: Organic imagery appeals to the internal sensations of a reader. These can either be physical (like hunger) or emotional (like sadness).
Imagery examples
The following chart details examples of imagery by type:
| Imagery Type | Examples |
|---|---|
| Visual | • The stars seem to shimmer in the sky.
• The sun glistened off of the calm lake. • The lights reflected in the eyes of the excited children. |
| Auditory | • The teacher's nails on the chalkboard had a piercing effect.
• The sweet melodies of the holidays rang throughout the store. • The pounding of the jackhammers wouldn't let me sleep. |
| Olfactory | • The smell of cinnamon wafted in the air.
• The aroma of freshly baked chocolate cookies welcomed her into the kitchen. • The fragrance from the flowers had a calming effect. |
| Gustatory | • The candy melts in your mouth.
• She enjoyed the tartness of the apples. • The mint toothpaste the dentist used had a sharp flavor. |
| Tactile | • My toes sank into the sand on the beach.
• The coarseness of the sandpaper helped smooth the bumps in the wall. • He couldn't stop itching the little scratches left by the tiny blades of grass. |
| Kinesthetic | • I slipped on the ice while trying to navigate my driveway.
• After riding the teacups, my body stopped spinning, but my head didn't. • He spread his arms and started flapping as if he thought he could take flight. |
| Organic | • My heart sank when I heard the news.
• The excitement leading up to the summer swelled up in me like a balloon. • My muscles tensed as I could feel the anxiety balling up in my stomach. |
Imagery in poetry
The following examples detail how writers use various types of imagery in poetry:
Visual: Sonnet 130 by William Shakespeare
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; / Coral is far more red than her lips' red; / If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; / If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
Auditory: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The ice was here, the ice was there, / The ice was all around: / It cracked and growled, and roared and / howled, / Like noises in a swound!
Olfactory: "Rain in Summer" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
They silently inhale / the clover-scented gale, / And the vapors that arise / From the well-watered and smoking soil.
Gustatory: "This Is Just to Say" by William Carlos Williams
I have eaten / the plums / that were in the icebox … Forgive me / they were delicious / so sweet / and so cold.
Tactile: "My Papa's Waltz" by Theodore Rothke
At every step you missed / My right ear scraped a buckle. / You beat time on my head / With a palm caked hard by dirt, / Then waltzed me off to bed / Still clinging to your shirt.
Kinesthetic: "Mother to Son" by Langston Hughes
But all the time / I’se been a-climbin’ on, / And reachin’ landin’s, / And turnin’ corners, / And sometimes goin’ in the dark / Where there ain’t been no light.
Organic: "Birches" by Robert Frost
So was I once myself a swinger of birches. / And so I dream of going back to be. / It’s when I’m weary of considerations, / And life is too much like a pathless wood.
Imagery in literature
The following examples incorporate the use of imagery in literary works:
Visual: Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven, / Having some business, do entreat her eyes / To twinkle in their spheres till they return. What if her eyes were there, they in her head? / The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars, / As daylight doth a lamp.
Auditory: Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.
Olfactory: Charlotte's Web by E.B. White
The barn was very large. It was very old. It smelled of hay and it smelled of manure. It smelled of the perspiration of tired horses and the wonderful sweet breath of patient cows. It often had a sort of peaceful smell as though nothing bad could happen ever again in the world. It smelled of grain and of harness dressing and of axle grease and of rubber boots and of new rope. And whenever the cat was given a fish head to eat, the barn would smell of fish.
Gustatory: A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
The hour was approaching at which the continental breakfast begins, or rather ceases, to tell, and the ladies bought some hot chestnut paste out of a little shop, because it looked so typical. It tasted partly of the paper in which it was wrapped, partly of hair oil, partly of the great unknown.
Tactile: "There Will Come Soft Rains" by Ray Bradbury
The house shuddered, oak bone on bone, its bared skeleton cringing from the heat, its wire, its nerves revealed as if a surgeon had torn the skin off to let the red veins and capillaries quiver in the scalded air. Help, help! Fire! Run, run! Heat snapped mirrors like the first brittle winter ice.
Kinesthetic: A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
At last, swooping at a street corner by a fountain, one of its wheels came to a sickening little jolt, and there was a loud cry from a number of voices, and the horses reared and plunged.
Organic: The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it.