Joe, you pose and answer an interesting question: "Why is it that all literature and especially poetry makes use of image drastically more than our regular speech?"

I think also, especially in terms of poetry itself, the use of imagery creates a mini paradox. I mean, language is nearly always a sort of smoke-screen or filter for experience, and the capacity for words to directly reach their referents without sending out all types of contextual ambiguities seems rare. So what does the art form do? Insists even more adamantly on imagery as an aesthetic virtue...