Synesthesia in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ekphrasis: from audible paintings to tangible ideas

Introduction Synesthesia in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetry has already been studied by Glenn O’Malley in his Shelley and Synesthesia (1964) and mentioned by critics like Richard Fogle, but usually without any reference to the poet’s prose and more particularly his ekphrases of paintings. The transaesthetic passage from painting to literary texts yet involves a relative change of emphasis from the visual to the audible or oral and from physical to mental experience, and can therefore be describ..