Synaesthesia in the poetry of John Keats

Abstract

Image & imagery, literary study of imagery, seven kinds of mental images, synaesthetic imagery, John Keats’ imagery, blend of sensations, visual kinaesthetic & visual olfactory image in Hyperion, Visual tactile & visual organic image in Endymion, visual gustatory imagery in ode to nightingale, Keats’ taste of vintage evokes sensations, synaesthetic imagery -the province of poetry.

John Keats is a sensual poet; his poetry is focused on  vivid, concrete, imagery, portrayal of the physical and the passionate; and  immersed in the here and now. One nineteenth century critic went so far as to assert not merely that Keats had "a mind constitutionally inapt for abstract thinking," but that he "had no mind." Keats's much-quoted outcry, "O for a life of Sensation rather than of Thoughts!" (Keats’ letter to Benjamin Bailey, November 22, 1817)¹

John Keats’ imagery ranges among all our physical sensations: sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell, temperature, weight, pressure, hunger, thirst, sexuality, and movement. He repeatedly combines different senses in one image, i.e., he attributes the trait(s) of one sense to another, a practice called synaesthesia. His synaesthetic imagery performs two major functions in his poems: it is part of their sensual effect, and the combining of senses normally experienced as separate suggests an underlying unity of dissimilar happenings, the oneness of all forms of life. Richard H. Fogle calls these images the product of his "unrivalled ability to absorb, sympathize with, and humanize natural objects."

This paper aims at observing some of the mental images in the poems of John Keats which are identified by the psychologists: visual (sight, then brightness, clarity, colour, and motion), auditory (hearing), olfactory (smell), gustatory (taste) tactile (touch, then temperature, texture), organic (awareness of heartbeat, pulse, breathing, digestion), and kinaesthetic (awareness of muscle tension and movement).