SEMANTIC FOREGROUNDING OF SENSORY PERCEPTION IN JOHN KEATS'S ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE

Abstract

Romantic poems have a strong sense of perception that seeks to represent complex philosophical issues. Traditional literary criticism tends to praise John Keats's Ode to a Nightingale for its aesthetic value but has barely examined how exactly this aesthetic value is created in the poem; that is, the real linguistic mechanism that it has achieved. The present study aims to fill this methodological gap by using the method of semantic stylistics, which is a rigorous method. The goals are to find the foregrounded sensory lexical patterns and to explore the direct contribution of the patterns to the thematic construction. The analysis is qualitative descriptive-analytical in which the auditory, visual, olfactory, gustatory, and tactile lexemes are taken out. The gathered data are systematically analyzed in terms of semantic deviation, both synesthetic blending and selection restriction violations. Poetry has employed an extremely structured use of perceptual modalities. Keats purposely excises the visual lexemes to require an extreme use of the olfactory and abstract auditory fields and thus creates a temporary imaginative haven. The analysis offers a method of connecting the physical materiality of the works to transcendence. This study enhances the poem's comprehension by placing abstract themes into the context of explicit lexical evidence