The base of Whalen's poetry is not so much the perception or even the object itself, the historic grounds of Imagist esthetics, but the phrase in which a sensation enters the language function of mind. That point of impact marks a transformation of outer to inner realm, a cross-over into the yielding human imagination which doesn't seek to translate or manipulate the experience, but enjoy it in a felicitous wording of the encounter. That can only be by flashes and intuitive leaps, so the phrase is necessarily like its antecedent, the image, a discrete entity lacking in emotional or psychological connections to anything else. The phrase or sentence in Whalen is in itself a complete occasion, bounded by the input of an experience which the words embed in a lucid perception.