As late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century scientific advancements generated new modes of comprehending life and matter, they also expanded the modalities of sensation, and generated new representations of the senses and of the act of sensing. Touch joined sight as a predominant source of analogies for scientific investigation. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the proliferation of modes of scientific imaging based on transferring the object of observation onto a material subjectile: from anatomical casts to the study of fossil imprints, modes of apprehension involving direct transfer ‘from matter to matter’ flourished, endowing direct contact with a paradigmatic role. What happens, then, to Romantic vision when touch reasserts itself? The creative interactions between touch and sight raises with renewed acuity the question of the modalities of figuration at the heart of Romantic conceptions of imagination. Who or what is sensitive and affected? Who and what envisions?

Scientific discourse on the vibratory nature of light and sound is reflected and deflected by the supple and regular structures of Percy Shelley’s last poems, which trace the emergence of transient beauty through an aesthetics of propagation and dispersal. In ‘To Jane. The Recollection’, ‘Lines written in the Bay of Lerici’, and ‘The Triumph of Life’ (1822), Shelley reflects on the fate of light and sound once they come into contact with the humours and integuments of the eye and the ear. The motif of the waveform, as a transient signal reaching the sense organs through the fluid mediums of water and of air, reflects the pleasure and transience of contact. This creative state of the body is unstable, like the eye of a storm, and the poems also record the moments when sensation comes undone, when the signal unravels and dissolves into the noise of ordinary sense-data.

The Romantic age is generally seen as fertile ground for vibrant synaesthesiæ, reconciliations of the senses, when, for instance, one is invited to feel the texture of an object by merely looking at it: sight endowed with the power to touch at a distance. This chapter explores the opposite, uncomfortable experience of the eye forced into direct contact, when touch invades the eye and neutralizes sight, in order for poetic vision to emerge. It is an invitation to explore the other side of synaesthesia in the works of a late Romantic and fervent reader of earlier Romantic poetry: Thomas De Quincey. De Quincey’s attempts at healing the disconnection between sight and touch aims at imaginatively turning the eye into a sensitive surface. De Quincey’s aesthetics of development, in the photographic sense, opens up new sensory experiments into the relationship between sight and touch.

The last chapter brings the volume full circle as it looks into the ultimate confines of perception, across the limits of death. Contrasting with the Christian sacralization of the last breath, physiological research at the time revealed various stages in death, when vital organs fail one after the other, raising the troubling possibility of sensory remanence running through nervous fibres as the body gradually dies. These specters of sensations were invested by the Romantic imagination. This chapter investigates paradoxical imaginings of sensation after death in Keats’s Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil, Percy Shelley’s ‘The Sensitive-Plant’, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which registers the dawn of sensation in a creature composed of tissues taken from the charnel-house, learning to feel through dead flesh. Such sensory experiments offer imaginative answers to the paradoxical question: what do the dead see through closed eye, through empty orbits?

This chapter looks at poetic explorations into the visionary powers of nonhumans. It examines a series of sense experiments in the works of Erasmus Darwin, Percy Shelley, and John Clare. For these poets, there is more than meets the human eye, as creativity is not limited to humankind. They draw on scientific investigations into the sensory apparatuses of animals and on research about the metabolic process later termed ‘photosynthesis’, in which the whole surface of the vegetal body is sensitive to light. That sensitivity, in which the body is both all eye and all skin, is the most vital sense, the one that truly defines plant life in its uncanny vitality. In these imaginary experiments, by endeavouring to experience the world through nonhuman senses, the poet encounters multifarious sensory modalities, as well as strangely intense forms of vision.

Frankenstein consistently associates the apparition of the moon with the creature. The first occurrence takes place during the creature’s animation ‘by the dim and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the window-shutters’ (p. 39). The second one happens during the creature’s account of the awakening of his senses: ‘Soon a gentle light stole over the heavens, and gave me a sensation of pleasure. I started up, and beheld a radiant form rise from among the trees. I gazed with a kind of wonder’ (p. 80). That ‘kind of wonder’ comes with the sense of agency built by the verbs ‘stole’ and ‘rise’, themselves reminiscent of the strength and will associated with the verb ‘forced its way’ when the moon first appears. The noun ‘form’ is poised in between the optical and the bodily, between mere sense data and the feel of a presence. The creature recognizes and experiences his own mode of animation through the perception of inorganic objects moving around him that seem endowed with agency. In that highly rhetorical passage that foregrounds the written quality of what is supposed to be an oral account, language unfolds its poetic potentialities to animate mere things. The passage reflects on the way literary writing pursues forms of animation and captures them even in lifeless things. When Romantic literature comes into contact with the sciences of its time, it discovers another language that animates what seems inert, raising the question: is this the revelation of a form of vitality in inorganic beings or a mere effect of language?