Eight Types of Obscure Poetic Images

Abstract

The fundamentally “monologic” poetry seems “resistant” to the readers, to a remarkable extent, in that they contain obscure images inside to help convey ideas. That the image as the signifier can be arbitrary, and that the signified could be infinite are so confusing that the poetry is believed sometimes “unreadable”. By analysing the eight types of the obscurity of the poetic images in Yeats’ works, the essay wishes to help found a constructive way to read and interpret the poems.Key words: Obscure; Poetic image; Infiniteness; Symbolism