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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Stephen de Ullmann
Stephen de Ullmann*
Affiliation:
Reading, England
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Extract

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.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 60 , Issue 3 , September 1945 , pp. 811 - 827
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1945

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References

1 The Letters of John Keats, edited by M. B. Forman, 2nd ed. (Oxford Univ. Press, 1935), p. 215.

2 Ibid., p. 305.

3 Ibid., p. 413.

4 See e.g., on this subject C. L. Finney, The Evolution of Keats' Poetry (Harvard Univ. Press, 1936): passim; a list will be found in vol. ii, p. 785. For some quotations from Byron on Keats, see B. Askwith, Keats (London, 1941), pp. 64 ff.—I regret not to have been able to consult S. Arestad, A Study of Keats' Use of Imagery (Univ. of Washington Abstracts of Theses), iv, 327-330.

5 See e.g., E. v. Erhardt-Siebold, “Harmony of the Senses in English, German, and French Romanticism,” PMLA, xlvii (1932), 577-592, 588 f.

6 Cf. D. W. Rannie; “Keats's Epithets,” Essays and Studies, iii (1912), 92-113.

7 In her thesis Lord Byron, Versuch einer Strukturanalyse (Marburg, 1932), E. Wieschke describes Byron as a “Synästhetiker,” using the word in the sense given it by Jaensch. She hastens to add: “Zu der Bezeichnung Synästhetiker sei gleich hier gesagt, daß sie nicht das Wesentliche dieses Typus zum Ausdruck bringt. Die Synästhesie, die Verknüpfung der verschiedenen Sinnesgebiete, ist nur ein oft vorhandenes diagnostisches Merkmal, an dem diese Grundform leicht erkannt werden kann, aber sie ist kein Wesenscharakteristikum, sie kann sogar fehlen. Das trifft etwa für Byron zu” (p. 12).

8 A general discussion and selective bibliography of synaesthesia will be found in my paper: “Composite Metaphors in Longfellow's Poetry,” RES, (1942), pp. 219-228. A partly co-extensive bibliography was given by W. Silz in his recent article: “Heine's synaesthesia,” PMLA, lvii (June, 1942), 469-488.

9 On semantic and panchronic laws, see e.g., G. Stern, “Meaning and Change of Meaning,” Göteborgs Högskolas Arsskrift (1931), 185-191; J. R. Firth, “The Technique of Semantics,” Transactions of the Philological Society (1935), pp. 36-72: p. 42; L. H. Gray, Foundations of Language (New York, 1939), p. 24; O. Jespersen, Mankind, Nation, and Individual, p. 212, etc. The panchronic possibilities of semantic laws are examined in a paper of mine on “Laws of Language and Laws of Nature,” MLR, xxxviii, 328-338.

10 J. E. S. Downey, Creative Imagination (London, 1929), pp. 94 ff. Cf. also W. Silz, loc. cit., p. 470, and E. v. Erhardt-Siebold, loc. cit., pp. 581, 588.

11 Erhardt-Siebold, loc. cit., p. 584.

12 Ibid., p. 584.—This phenomenon is closely related to what W. Silz calls “shifting of a quality”: “In a dream, the poet hears ”eine niedlich duftende Veilchenstimme“ (iii, 253). This is not, as would appear, an acoustic-olfactory synaesthesia, but a mere transfer of the attributes of prettiness and fragrance from a humanized violet to its voice” (loc. cit., p. 482).

13 Cf. C. Bally, Traité de Stylistique Française, pp. 44-48: “homonymes étymologiques et sémantiques.”—For the danger of confusion between the synchronic and diachronic method, see M. Sandmann, “On Linguistic Explanation,” MLR, xxxvi (1941), 195-212.

14 Hints about the existence of such a regularity were hazarded by more than one student, e.g., Dromard in Journal de Psychologie, iv, 492, and Z. Gombocz, in “Jelentéstan,” Semasiology, p. 83; see, however, Irving Babbitt's tentative suggestion, in The New Laokoon, pp. 174 f: “So far as my own observation goes, I should say that the habit of interpreting sound in terms of color may exist without any special hyperaesthesia, but that the habit of interpreting light or color in terms of sound is nearly always a sign of nervous disorder.”

15 Editions used: The Poetical Works of Lord Byron (Oxford University Press, 1926), and the Everyman edition of Keats' poems (repr. 1940).

16 The reason why, among the upper levels of the sensorium, sound attracts far more transfers than sight does, is largely a matter for conjecture. One possible explanation may be that visual terminology and imagery is richer and altogether more graphic and expressive than acoustic terminology, and is therefore less dependent on borrowings from other senses. Cf. E. v. Erhardt-Siebold, loc. cit., p. 581: “The vocabulary for some sense reactions, those of taste or smell, for instance, is so limited that a borrowing from the terminology of other senses seems indispensable. A catalogue of wine will furnish here rich examples.”

17 Cf. E. v. Siebold, ESt. liii, 208 and 278.

18 E. v. Erhardt-Siebold, PMLA, xlvii, 587 f.—On the disputed origin of this axiom see I. Babbitt, op. cit., p. 61, n. 1.

19 T. S. Eliot, “Byron,” From Anne to Victoria, ed. B. Dobrée (London, 1937), pp. 611 f. (my italics).

20 Op. cit., pp. 101 f.—Much the same ground is covered by the same author's paper, “Literary Synaesthesia,” The Journal of Philosophy, ix, 490-498; pp. 495 f.

21 B. W. A. Massey, The Compound Epithets of Shelley and Keats (Poznan, 1923), p. 177.

22 Op. cit., pp. 105 ff.

23 See also NED, s.v. enwreathed.