“Ode to a Nightingale”: Poetry and the Particularity of Sense

Abstract

ABSTRACTI propose that Keats’s attention to the fine workings of sensory imagery creates cognitive effects that go beyond his famed synesthesia. Focusing on the “Ode to a Nightingale,” I trace that poem's wry critique of fancy through its auditory conceit and concomitant rejection of culturally and psychologically dominant visuocentric imageries of place. Where visual imagery fluently “thinks” in spatial terms, auditory imageries of space tend toward the strained, estranged, or impossible, leaving the speaker struggling to effect the imaginative escape he desires. Rejecting the easy transition from poetic voice to visual imagination, which he had eagerly embraced in earlier works like “On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer,” Keats discovers a cognitive catch in imagination that is accessible only through insistent refusal—a truly negative manifestation of “negative capability.” Finally, I turn to the aural irruption of the speaker's voice—“Forlorn!”—to reveal how Keats's exploration of the particularity of sensory imagery also gives rise to imaginings that are unique to the cognitive ecosystem of verse.