explain the meaning of the statement: "The metaphor provokes a sharp, intuitive discovery in order to get at the essence of life."

I could not find a direct answer, but this might help

Explanation:

The imagist movement included English and American poets in the early twentieth century who wrote free verse and were devoted to “clarity of expression through the use of precise visual images.” A strand of modernism, imagism was officially launched in 1912 when Ezra Pound read and marked up a poem by Hilda Doolittle, signed it “H. D. Imagiste,” and sent it to Harriet Monroe at Poetry magazine.

The movement sprang from ideas developed by T. E. Hulme, who—as early as 1908—was proposing to the Poets’ Club in London a poetry based on absolutely accurate presentation of its subject with no excess verbiage. The first tenet of the imagist manifesto was “To use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word.”

Imagism was a reaction against the flabby abstract language and “careless thinking” of Georgian romanticism. Imagist poetry aimed to replace muddy abstractions with exactness of observed detail, apt metaphors, and economy of language. For example, Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” started from a glimpse of beautiful faces in a dark subway and elevated that perception into a crisp vision by finding an intensified equivalent image. The metaphor provokes a sharp, intuitive discovery in order to get at the essence of life.

-Project A.I.S. 2021