The status of the different kinds of imagery through which poems assert their being in the world has profound implications for the translation of poetry. While some images construct a sense of place and instant, others serve as ‘objective correlates’ or as supports for logopoeia (to name just two of the less immediately referential functions of poetic imagery). It is naïve to take all images at face value (as in fact most translators do). There are indeed cases where the sense of an immediate Real behind the image is sacrosaint, but images at the other end of the spectrum are free variants whose manifest contents can and should be sacrificed to music, mood or even to “the dance of the intellect among words”. The author explores these ideas with a corpus of English and French translations ranging from Ovid and Dante through Auden, Saint John Perse and John Ashbery.