Three strands of poetry:
1) Physical poetry--"the poetry which deals with things";
2) Platonic poetry--"the poetry of ideas"; and
3) Metaphysical poetry--that poetry which starts with things and from them generates ideas in a dialectical tension.

The image, rather than the idea, is of paramount importance in poetry.

"An idea is derivative and tamed. The image is in the natural or wild state, and it has to be discovered there, not put there, obeying its own law and none of ours."

"In it [art] we return to something we had willfully alienated."

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        Ransom splits poetry into three strands: 1) Physical poetry--"the poetry which deals with things"; 2) Platonic poetry--"the poetry of ideas"; and 3) Metaphysical poetry--that poetry which starts with things and from them generates ideas in a dialectical tension.
        For Ransom, the image, rather than the idea, is of paramount importance in poetry. The image is that by which poets "present things in their thingness, or Dinge in their Dinglichkeit." The idea robs the image of its aesthetic power. "An idea is derivative and tamed. The image is in the natural or wild state, and it has to be discovered there, not put there, obeying its own law and none of ours."
        Art seems to be a return to an original innocence for Ransom: "In it we return to something we had willfully alienated." There also seems to be an anti-intellectual thread in Ransom's thought here: "Imagism is motivated by a distaste for the systematic abstactedness of thought." However, I think the last charge--were it to be made--is a misrepresentation. What the preference for Imagism reflects is the Arnoldian desire to see things as they are: "the image . . . has to be discovered there, not put there."