Artistic Synesthesiacs

Synesthesia: “(1) The production of a sense impression relating to one sense of part of the body by stimulation of another sense of part of the body. (2) The poetic description of a sense impression in terms of another sense, as in “a loud perfume” or “an icy voice”.” (Oxford English Dictionary). Garry Lutz’s essay, The Sentence Is A Lonely Place, describes, among other things, the characteristic of literature of attributing words and letters that have a secondary attribute, to a context in which the situation’s description is enhanced through such use of words. Many of these examples include those attributed to music and nature. Nature, in particular, is stressed: In Shakespeare’s plays, like Romeo And Juliet, the famous sonnet May I Compare Thee To A Summer’s Day… (Sonnet XVIII) has tons of nature attributions.