The Synaesthetic Link Synaesthesia is the condition where an individual’s experiences of the senses blur. Sounds are colourful, words have taste, smells have feelings. Poetic synaesthesia has been considered an ‘innovation of the eighteenth (or even nineteenth) century’ that is associated with a ‘specifically Romantic psychology’ (O’Malley, 1957, pp. 397 – 398). The Romantic poets […]
The Romantic Lyric Structure The answer lies in the structure of the Romantic lyric. Jack Stillinger identified that the lyrical poetry of Keats’s time followed a structure as identified in this diagram: The horizontal line represents the boundary between the real world (below) and the imaginary, or ideal, world (above). The ideal world is placed […]
‘Viewless Wings of Poesy’: Oral Enchantment in Keats and Tolkien John Keats (1795 – 1821) and J.R.R. Tolkien (1892 – 1973) are not the most likely of pairings when it comes to comparing writers. Keats was deeply concerned with the beauty and pain that life presented in poems such as ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and […]
