"Synaesthesia" in Emily Dickinson's Poetry

Abstract

In his New Laocoon, Irving Babbitt attacked what has since come to be known as Seeing it as a symptom of a general confusion in the arts perpetrated by the Romantic movement, he concluded: We are living in an age that has gone mad on the powers of suggestion in everything from its arts to its therapeutics (1910:84). Critics of the next generation, finding perhaps that they were living in quite a different age, sought to defend literary synaesthesia. To do so, they adopted two main strategies: they carefully distinguished literary from the clinical kind, that psychological aberration known variously as audition coloree, Farbenhoren, and chromesthesia; and they demonstrated that there was a long and noble tradition of in literature, a tradition which included many major figures and stretched back at least as far as Homer. The process of rehabilitation was impressively initiated by Erika von Erhardt-Siebold in her thesis, Syndisthesien in der englischen Dichtung des 19. Jahrhunderts; it was triumphantly concluded by Stephen Ullmann, most particularly in his formulation of panchronistic tendencies in literary synaesthesia in Principles of Semantics (1957:266-289). During the three decades that elapsed between the works of Siebold and Ullmann mentioned above, Emily Dickinson's poetry was either too little known or too little accessible to be taken into consideration by those engaged in the debate about synaesthesia. Moreover, now that the debate has been wound up with the complete vindication of literary as an ancient and honorable technique, there has perhaps been little incentive for critics to examine Dickinson's use of this technique in any great detail.' This