Editor's Choice
Explain the three uses of "imagery": conveying emotion, suggesting ideas, and evoking experience.
Quick answer:
Imagery uses sensory descriptions to convey emotion, suggest ideas, and evoke experiences. By engaging the senses, imagery allows readers to feel emotions deeply, as seen when describing a character's grief through sensory details rather than abstract statements. It also evokes sensory experiences by vividly depicting settings, such as a clear sky or a crowded city. Additionally, it suggests ideas by prompting readers to reflect on the imagery's emotional or thematic significance, as exemplified in Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud."
Imagery is description using the five senses of sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. I don't know what your second point means, but imagery is a powerful and effective way to convey emotion (your first point) and also to mentally evoke sense experiences (your third point).
Although it can seem counterintuitive, imagery is how writers convey emotion. It would seem straightforward to say "Emily was filled with grief at Jarrad's death," but that statement is so abstract it can leave us cold. However, if we paint a sensory picture of Emily's grief, we are much more likely to feel it: we might write something to the effect that Emily was surprised to find Jarrad's favorite blue work shirt hanging in the closet. She pulled it out and hugged it as if Jarrad were still in, feeling its rough fabric against her neck. She put her face into it and smelled...
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Jarrad's familiar scent of sweat and grass. Tears began to flow down her face.
The images in the second passage are much more emotionally moving than simply stating that Emily felt grief. We are there with Emily and her pain because we can see, feel, and smell what she does.
Imagery is also the chief way writers evoke sensory experiences. If a writer wants us, for example, to experience in our minds what a place is like, he or she will use sensory images so that we can know the sky is clear and blue, the wind is cold against our cheeks, there is a damp smell in the air, and the setting is silent. She might also use sensory images that convey the sight, sound, smell, and feel of a crowded city so that we can imagine ourselves there. Often writers use metaphors or similes, which create a picture in our mind by comparing one thing to another thing.
I have always felt that the best description of imagery is to see it in the action of literature. When one sees imagery, they might be best to understand it. Bearing this in mind, I think being able to survey the literature that you have experienced for examples of successful imagery would be extremely worthwhile and compelling. For example, reading Wordsworth's poem, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" is one such poem with different uses of imagery, or mental pictures. His description of the daffodils in the first two stanzas help to mentally evoke the sensation experience of seeing a field of flowers. Examine these stanzas and find the lines or verses that reflect sensation, as if one is experiencing the moment with the speaker. At the same time, these lines help to convey extreme emotion, and more if conveyed in the third stanza when the speaker seeks to make sense of this moment in "his mind's eye." I think that this is one poem of many where examples of imagery can be experienced for oneself.