William Wordsworth at 28, by William Shuter
Nicola Healey
Smell is arguably the poet’s sense, and the most poetic sense: it is the most mysterious, least understood sense; scent triggers buried memories (those magical Proustian bursts), so is a source of deep inspiration; a smell stimulates feeling, thought and vitality, acting on the brain more instinctively than our other senses, even unconsciously; we literally take in odour molecules on the breath; and a textual scent (we are always told) is a shorthand way of bringing a poem, or any piece of writing, to life for the reader.
All of this process becomes inaccessible or hampered if you lose your sense of smell (anosmia). This makes smell loss especially destabilising for poets. Discernment of the fine gradations of scent and flavour also exercises cognitive ability, attunement to nuance and depth, opening different dimensions, freeing the imagination. So, for a poet (and a reader), loss of smell is an occupational existential wound as well as a human one. You fear, as an instrument, you have been made blunter.
A. E. Stallings describes this fear so well in her recent poem ‘Anosmia’, published in the London Review of Books in April 2025. This is the poem I have been waiting for and feels definitive: ‘What thought trails do I lose, untraceable, / What wisdom lack?’ Smell, like poetry, captures the essence of something, beyond surfaces, and can feel primordial, essential (in both senses). The speaker in Oliver Baez Bendorf’s poem ‘Evergreen’ crushes a basil leaf ‘just to / smell the inside of a thing’ – what it really is, distilled. It is exactly this – swift access to ‘the inside’ of things – that we lose without smell.
Compared to sight and hearing, the importance of smell (to humanity, wellbeing and art) has long been underappreciated. This is perhaps, in part, because smell and its loss defy precise description – due to both the ethereal, ephemeral nature of scent, and the frustrating poverty of language that exists even to discuss smell. Which is all the more reason to try and write about it – to give this sense and its loss the substance that it deserves.
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In March 2020, just before the first UK lockdown, I caught Covid. I developed strange symptoms of what came to be known as ‘long Covid’, particularly extreme fatigue, but for me the worst effect was sudden, profound and enduring loss of smell. There was not a whiff of the abundant flowers which people effused about that cruel April.
Nature’s scents – fleeting and yet one true constant in life (or so I thought) – had become a lifeline for me, a form of medicine. They marked a drift of time, giving it cyclical meaning, studded with subtle joy and wonder, forming a kind of psychic scaffolding and safety net. Each year I looked forward to primroses in March, the apple blossom in April, followed by the white lilac, and then my favourite: Philadelphus ‘Belle Étoile’ (mock orange) in June. I longed, in particular, to smell the earth after rain: petrichor – its distinctive mineral air. The word derives from the Greek petra: ‘rock’, or petros: ‘stone’; and īchōr: ‘the fluid that flows in the veins of the gods’. There is something godly about these life-igniting odours, as if scent has the power to break through stone. And not being able to smell my sister’s dog was one of the most upsetting losses – it felt like her essence had left the world, that a vital cord that bound me to her had been cut.
I couldn’t detect a trace of anything – not even eye-wateringly strong mustard or petrol – and knew something was very wrong. Anosmia had not been officially recognised as a symptom of Covid at this point, so there was no real understanding or medical guidance; many people seemed to treat it with incredulity or bemused indifference – smell loss is widely trivialised, even laughed at, in a way that would not happen with blindness or deafness. I was floored that this total sudden loss could even happen.
Without being able to smell, I felt trapped in my head. I was less able to connect with anything or anyone, to escape stressful states, and to help myself daily. It was indescribably disorientating, in myriad pervasive ways: you feel as if an ineffable dimension of existence has been stripped, leaving only a flat and sterile void. It is like suffering countless sudden griefs, due to so many things ceasing to be – every familiar flower, herb, food or drink item and more that you were previously connected to, often in a deeply emotive way and since childhood. Such traces make and bind us to the delicate fabric of life, surely as the breath which carries them. These bonds go largely unspoken in our daily lives, but without them the very integrity of living disintegrates. Losing your sense of smell, you feel like you have lost the world, and to a large degree you have: a vast plane of the phenomenological world.
Writing on the disappointment of mass-produced scentless roses in Orwell’s Roses (2021), Rebecca Solnit observes that ‘Scent is a kind of voice’. Without scent, the world falls silent, which not only feels like it is no longer subtly communicating with you, it feels as though it has died. This raises profound questions regarding what constitutes identity and meaning: is a rose without the scent of a rose still a rose?
My sense of smell took around eighteen months to truly repair, time in which I feared it might never do so. In any case, as Solnit neatly puts it, ‘Horror doesn’t have to be permanent to matter’. I suppose I am now suspicious of scent – and writing which conjures a scent – in the way that you would be wary of a person who had betrayed you. You no longer know where absolute truth lies. Everything seems more uncertain.
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In the early months of the pandemic, I tried to capture the experience of smell loss in poems, in the way that poetry can help us to order and contain – if not make sense of or relieve – the incomprehensible. Aside from death and grief, it is the subject I have found hardest to write about. I had a poem on anosmia in Wild Court in the summer of 2021, and at that time I could find no other poems on the subject. So it was great, and validating, to come across Jennifer Rose’s astonishing poem ‘On Losing the Sense of Smell’ a couple of years later, first published in The Paris Review in 1986. Rose movingly describes how lilacs are no longer intimately alive to her, nor can they emotionally transport her: ‘In my arms, lilacs like a former lover – / no heartbeat, no elevator.’ The wind is ‘an empty boat’ carrying no passengers. Colour leaches from the world as ‘Summer goes black and white’. Aside from this poem, and Stallings’s recent poem, I know of no established poems on smell loss. This is a gap in literature, a silence.
Though not on smell loss per se, Edward Thomas’s quietly powerful ‘Old Man’ stunned me around this time, an incredibly affecting poem on the herb also known as lad’s love. It perfectly encapsulates how smell is entwined with the formation of memories. Later in life, the speaker struggles to access not the plant’s scent (‘bitter’) but a buried memory its scent hints at. Thomas’s stark language speaks to the severing isolation, the disconnection from one’s past, which lies at the heart of the anosmic trauma: ‘I have mislaid the key. I sniff the spray / And think of nothing; I see and I hear nothing’. ‘No garden appears, no path’ […] ‘Neither father nor mother, nor any playmate; / Only an avenue, dark, nameless, without end.’
It is generally taken for granted that being able to smell is a universal, constant experience, and this can ostracise many readers. For instance, any scent-celebrating poem or piece of writing (even adverts) that I read from 2020 to 2021 caused me intense dismay and confusion, fear and even anger, undoing me each time: the text had lost meaning and purpose to me, even truth, as if it was corrupted, unreadable. This meant I became estranged from many of my own poems, several of which revere the power of scent. I remember coming across Rebecca Watts’s poem ‘Sweet peas for the wedding’ in Red Gloves (2020) and hoping that it would not allude to their wonderful, unending fragrance. I finished the poem with relief and gratitude – it had conjured only the flowers’ material evanescence; it lived. Ironically, at this time, only scentless poems could keep poetry alive to me.
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Remarkably, William Wordsworth was anosmic from birth. One of our most eminent nature poets could not smell the flowers, the distinct seasons and the Lake District land that he immortalised; his scent impressions were second-hand. His nephew, Christopher, wrote in Memoirs of William Wordsworth (1851): ‘With regard to fragrance, Mr. Wordsworth spoke from the testimony of others: he himself had no sense of smell.’ In The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey (1849), Southey remarked that Wordsworth ‘often expressed to me his regret for this privation’. Perhaps Wordsworth became the towering poet he was partly because his other senses and his imagination, even an integrating sixth sense, relentlessly had to work harder to ‘read’ nature and the world.
Indeed, in The Prelude, Wordsworth describes the ‘tyranny’ of the eye, calling sight ‘The most despotic of our senses’, remembering a time when the eye had ‘gained / Such strength in me as often held my mind / In absolute dominion’. If you cannot smell, your other senses would become more dominant, even overbearing at times, as well as, conversely, more vital. Nature, when we have all our senses, Wordsworth continues, enacts a freeing harmony of sense and incoming intelligence, ‘studiously employs to thwart / This tyranny, summons all the senses each / To counteract the other (and themselves)’:
And makes them all, and the objects with which all
Are conversant, subservient in their turn
To the great ends of liberty and power.
In ‘Tintern Abbey’, Wordsworth famously recounts a solitary sublime experience beyond sight, through which we transcend the body: ‘with an eye made quiet by the power / Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, / We see into the life of things’. It is striking to remember that he had no sensory access to Bendorf’s ‘inside of a thing’. Wordsworth talks in ‘Tintern Abbey’ of having felt ‘A motion and a spirit, that impels / All thinking things, all objects of all thought / And rolls through all things’: ‘a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused’. He isn’t referring to scent’s power, but this is a very good description of it.
The pandemic has enabled countless people to experience the world in the austere, lonely way that Wordsworth did, and so to understand the true nature of his ‘privation’, an invisible affliction which must have been deeply formative to his life and poetic sensibility, something which has been vastly overlooked in Wordsworth studies. I did my PhD on the Wordsworths, and though I did vaguely know about his anosmia at that time, in the summer of 2020 I had to remind myself that I did, finding I’d mentioned it in a footnote over ten years previously. Perhaps he ‘wandered lonely as a cloud’ partly because he felt pretty isolated and alienated from others who could smell. To an extent, he did not know what he was missing as he had not suffered its sudden, shocking loss. He must have felt like he was outside a paradise on earth though. When a companion with whom Wordsworth was walking at Racedown expressed delight at the fragrance of some flowers, Southey said ‘it was like a vision of Paradise’ to Wordsworth.
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Wordsworth was known to be largely uninterested in food, and to favour simple, plain meals – perhaps this was related to his inability to smell. Anosmia essentially strips you of two senses: it isn’t widely appreciated that smell defines the nuances of taste, giving food flavour, making eating pleasurable. (Taste itself only allows us to tell whether something is salty, sweet or sour, as well as bitter or savoury.) If food tastes of nothing, it can feel pointless to eat – certainly to eat flavourful food – every mouthful a reminder of what is missing.
This is the ideal, joyless climate for depression to set in. Tragically, in the documentary Mystify: Michael Hutchence (2019), it was suggested that the worsening depression and ultimate suicide of the INXS singer – who was intensely interested in scent – stemmed from him losing his sense of smell and taste (due to a brain injury, caused by an altercation with a taxi driver). As Kate Mossman observes in the New Statesman, in losing this, he lost ‘the essence of his being’, leaving him ‘floating in space’. Strikingly, Elizabeth Zierah, who suffered a stroke at the age of 30, writes in Slate that ‘without hesitation I can say that losing my sense of smell has been more traumatic than adapting to the disabling effects of the stroke’. I don’t know why smell blindness (as it is also known) is generally considered a minor affliction when, from the sufferer’s perspective, it is often utterly life-changing. Like acute grief, it is very difficult – perhaps impossible – to understand this scentless-scape unless you enter its alien atmosphere yourself. The novelist Penny Hancock found that she couldn’t write when she had anosmia; in her excellent article, she describes how ‘Loss of smell, far from being a minor symptom of Covid, can feel catastrophic.’
Downplaying or denying the reality of anosmia ignores the immeasurable importance of quality of life, and the real impact of human suffering. (Subsequent strains of Covid-19, apparently, have not been so olfactorily destructive, in case any readers are terrified.) A widespread undervaluing of the sense of smell also undermines efforts to research and treat its loss. Many sufferers of Covid are still struggling with the effects of anosmia and parosmia (a distorted sense of smell), often overlooked elements of long Covid. Research published in the British Medical Journal in 2022 found that millions of people worldwide were still affected by anosmia more than six months on. The BBC reported in December 2022 that thousands in the UK were still suffering two years on. For these people especially, the pandemic is not in the past.
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True scents unlock a numinous realm – they simply relieve the burden of being human and are life-affirming. Anosmia is a startling reminder that scent – despite its poetic, almost whimsical nature, its association with sensibility – is primarily a neural process: it is created by each perceiving brain. Odours enable us to differentiate between discrete entities in the chaos of existence, and at a more primal, immersive level than the eye, where the boundaries between us and the sensed object collapse and we merge. As the philosopher Daniel Dennett brilliantly describes in Consciousness Explained (1991), if we could see in the same suffusive way that we smell, when a bird flew by ‘the sky would go all birdish’ for a while. To me, smell is soul, or the most immediate conduit to, and carrier of, a soul, a life force. A sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused. If you cannot smell or taste the atmospheric wonder of a mint leaf, what is it? It’s just a leaf.
Anosmia made me realise how important this most overlooked sense is to integrating with life and literature, to a sense of aliveness. Every time I sense a drifting smell now, I am quietly – speechlessly – grateful. In losing this sublime sense for an indefinite time, I also lost sense and coherence, in my personal philosophy of life: as in, things didn’t make sense anymore. I felt I’d lost access to poetry, too. I’ve learned that if you lose something fundamental to your being, you have to try and find a compensating power, even though this may feel against your will – the mind and the spirit, like the body, inherently want to maintain some kind of homeostasis. Sylvia Plath, in a letter to her mother, called this dogged, life-preserving force ‘that human principle which always finds that no matter how much is taken away, something is left to build again with’.