Musical Descriptions and Sensations: the Presence of Music in English Romantic Poetry

This paper examines a few characteristic examples of how the musical lexical field and auditory sensations at large are treated by the main English Romantic poets in the context of a renewed confidence in subjective perception. It aims at showing that musical sensations are part of the Romantic vision of the world (nostalgia for a forsaken harmony, quest for a transparent meaning) and that music stands both as a paradigm and a counter-model for poetic expression.