Romanticism and Synaesthesia: A Comparative Study of Sense Transfer in Keats and Byron

Abstract

In his correspondence, Keats refers more than once to the difference between himself and Byron. In a letter to Charles Wentworth Dilke, dated September 21, 1818, he distinguishes jokingly between: “1. superfine rich or noble poets—ut Byron. 2. common ut egomet—.” A few months later, on February 18th, 1819, he tells George and Georgiana Keats: “Lord Byron cuts a figure—but he is not figurative—Shakspeare led a life of Allegory: his works are the comments on it—.” Perhaps one might better read “Keats,” or at least “Keats as he liked to picture himself,” instead of “Shakespeare.” Just seven months later, in a letter written on September 18th of the same year to the same recipients, there occurs the celebrated, and utterly unconvincing, axiom: “You speak of Lord Byron and me—There is this great difference between us. He describes what he sees—I describe what I imagine. Mine is the hardest task. You see the immense difference.”

Psychophysical investigations into the neural basis of synaesthesia

“…tactile;`sharp' or`£at'), perhaps as a way of economizing on computational burden (Lako¡ 1987). In addition, it has been shown (Ullman 1945;Williams 1976) that sensory adjectives undergo systematic shifts from one sensory domain to another (e.g. loud colours or bitter cold).…”

Describing Sensory Experience: The Genre of Wine Reviews

“…It has been argued in the literature, that descriptions of perceptions are characterized by synesthesia from lower to higher modalities. In his pioneering work on synesthesia in poetry, Ullman (1945) proposes a hierarchy and a directional principle of sensory perceptions in metaphors from lower to higher sense modalities, i.e. from TOUCH > TASTE > SMELL to SOUND and VISION. His proposal has been recognized and developed in different areas of research by a number of scholars including historical linguists, e.g.…”

Universal meaning extensions of perception verbs are grounded in interaction

“…Finally, this study also examines intrafield extensions of perception verbs in conversationthat is, where a word that pertains to one perceptual modality is used to talk about another perceptual modality (see also a related literature on "synaesthetic metaphor", springing from Ullmann 1945 andWilliams 1976). From a diachronic perspective, Viberg (1983) argued that (at least with regard to certain verb classes) intrafield sense extensions were likely to be unidirectional, moving from higher to lower on a proposed hierarchy of the senses (see > hear > touch, taste, smell).…”