The phrase "verbal image" is correct and can be used in written English.
It refers to a vivid or descriptive depiction created through language rather than visual means. Example: The author's use of colorful and sensory words painted a powerful verbal image of the bustling cityscape.
So, verbal images of tremulous ecstasy or thwarted desire would be conveyed through piercingly seductive dissonances.
Like an abracadabra, her verbal images make live things materialise before our eyes.
And the verbal images were often more varied and surprising than the movements.
Despite his remark about the bluntness of language, Barnes's essays abound in verbal images that are pictorially vivid.
Flowers began to appear profusely in paintings and, as mentioned above, were used by poets in their verbal images.
To hear him talk, in his beautiful baritone, is to hear a life's narrative transformed through the mind's eye into verbal images.
Godard offered his visual and verbal images as delusive counterfeits for a life whose meaning has become irretrievably lost or perhaps was always intrinsically absurd.
Yet this discussion seems sterile since Ḥāfeẓ, whose verbal images shine like jewels, is an outstanding exponent of the ambiguous and oscillating style that makes Persian poetry so attractive and so difficult to translate.
The idea, apparently, is that associative connections between different verbal images are stronger, or more numerous, or form a more richly interconnected network, than do associative connections between verbal images and non-verbal ones (and vice-versa).
One response is to claim that the phenomenal aspects of understanding derive largely from linguistic (or verbal) images, which have the phonological and syntactic structure of items in the subject's native language.
