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Image-making, wrote Wallace Stevens, ‘is primarily a discipline of rightness.’ In a good image, something previously unformulated (in the most literal sense) comes into the realm of the expressed. Without precisely this image, we feel, the world’s store of truth would be diminished; and conversely, when a writer brings into language a new image that is fully right, what is knowable of existence expands.
Jane Hirshfield, from Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (1997, p. 18)