Synesthesia

Synesthesia derives its name from the Ancient Greek (syn), which means “with,” and (aisthēsis), meaning “sensation.” The condition is neurologically-based in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway causes an involuntary, separate response in another sensory or cognitive pathway.

In Romantic poetry and in nineteenth-century French Symbolism, Literary synaesthesia typically contributes to some undifferentiated emotional quality characteristic of certain altered states of consciousness--"vague, dreamy, or uncanny hallucinatory moods" (Stanford)--or a strange, magical experience or heightened mystery. In some varieties of mannerist poetry, as in some modernist and seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry, by contrast, synaesthesia typically makes for a witty quality. How can we account for this contrast? According to Coleridge, imagination involves "the balance and reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities" (Biographia Literaria, ch. 4). I submit that when the "opposite or discordant qualities" are more emphasized in a poem, the effect is witty; when their "reconciliation," the effect is emotional. The poet may manipulate attention, by rhetorical means, to the discordant qualities or their reconciliation. Synaesthesia (as well as the oxymoron) violently yokes together opposite or discordant qualities, inducing tension. So, it may contribute to a witty context, metaphysical or modernist. There may be, however, elements in a context that mitigate the perceived clash of opposites, one of them being heightened emotional energy; another, imagined spatial orientation. In such instances, synaesthesia (and oxymoron) reinforces rather than disrupts emotional qualities in poetry. (1)

Source Citation: Tsur, Reuven. "Issues in literary synaesthesia." Style. 41.1 (Spring 2007): p30. Literature Resource Center. Gale. DIABLO VALLEY COLLEGE. 23 Feb. 2009 .