| John Keats (1795---1821) was one of the greatest English Romantic Poets in the 19th century. Apart from his genius and creativity, Keats was a prolific poet and went on writing till he breathed his last. During and after his life, three collections of his poems were published, thus leaving a precious legacy in the literary treasure of the world and exerting far-reaching influence upon the art of poetry-composing.Being a romantic poet, Keats was acclaimed for his originality. Keats's originality didn't rely on such exterior facts as the least well educated, the worst class origin, the shortest-lived among the Romantic Poets, but relied on his unique insight on poetry and on his novel technique of poetry-composing. Keats scored tremendous achievements in the spheres of the art of poetry and the criterion of creation during his prime period of composing through painstaking exploration and unswerving practice.His six great odes and the artful use of the synaesthetic imagery in the odes could bespeak Keats's originality very well.Keats's six great odes were composed from January to September of 1819 and have generally been considered as his most important and mature works, particularly "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Ode to a Nightingale", "To Autumn", and "Ode on Melancholy". As is universally recognized, with both its own respective theme and the same dominant thoughts, each ode is worth highly eulogizing. These six odes are invocations of, and powerful meditations upon, the subjects which preoccupy Keats's poetry---love, art, sing, sorrow, and the natural world. The most eye-catching qualities of the odes lie in their vivid, tangible sensuousness and over-flowing, far-reaching sensuous imageries, among which the most expressive and colorful synaesthetic imagery takes the lion's share and should be given priority and special attention to.Synaesthesia or the synaesthetic imagery is a term of psychology, linguistics, and rhetoric and often called "移觉",or "通感" in Chinese. According to Webster's Third New International Dictionary, synaesthesia is a concomitant sensations; esp. a subjective sensation or image of senses (as of color) other than the one (as of sound) being stimulated. Dr. Chris Baldick defines synaesthesia in the Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms as this: a blending or confusion of different kinds of sense-impression, in which one type of sensation is referred to in terms more appropriate to another. Imagery is the use of descriptive language to recreate sensory experiences. Actually, an image is a verbal picture. The synaesthetic imagery refers to the shift of a special sensual imagery structure from its original sensation to the more appropriate modification of another sensation. It is still imagery with synaesthesia at its core. For any synaesthesia in an art or a piece of work cannot manage without imagery. In most cases, the synaestheticimagery and synaesthesia would be considered as the same thing only in different names. Keats was at home with the use of the synaesthetic imagery in his odes with his own unique art of creation and perfect form of presentation. It is no doubt that Keats was matchless among the Romantic Poets. His synaesthetic imagery in the odes doesn't belong to any specific sphere of art or literary scope, it is an artistic technique with a very broad theoretical basis.With the perfect use of synaesthetic imagery in his odes, Keats activated and refreshed all the senses and perceptions of the readers' and made them to see, to feel, and to perceive all that was otherwise devoured by the unconsciously automatic, thus helping them to get the strikeness and effect of the art. The synaesthetic imagery enables the odes to present meaning with an intricacy and complexity that ordinary language does not normally allow. In this view, the immediate effect of the use of the synaesthetic imagery is to make strange ( ostranenie ), to achieve defamiliarization , to make form difficult , to increase the difficulty and length of perception, and eventually to get... |
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