2 - Ekphrastic Poetics in and after Sight and Song

Summary

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

—Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600)

This chapter tells the story of the poet’s eye—the eye of Michael Field as The Poet—as it is involved in the specific practice of ekphrastic poetics. Here, I try to get into the time and space between looking at an art object and a finished poem about that art object. This is a difficult task, as much happens in that space and time where, as Michael Field’s role model, Shakespeare, put it, “imagination bodies forth.” For Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, the creation of “picture poems” involves a thinking and an imagining not only about the art object, but about the referent for that work of art—across space and across time. Their thinking and imagining, as I have previously argued, takes place from a queer-feminist perspective. Framing this observation with Sara Ahmed’s important work on how social norms combine with lived experience to produce one’s orientation in the world, we might say that Michael Field’s ekphrases illustrate a queer-feminist orientation toward the art object, its referent, their audience, and the world.

But as Shakespeare writes in the quote that heads this chapter, such a poetic act—an act of poiein, of making—is also an act in which the poet’s eye becomes engaged in a “fine frenzy rolling.” Presumably, the frenzied rolling of the eye makes the poet’s mind—and the poet’s body—feel frenzied as well. In the previous chapter, I demonstrated how Bradley and Cooper were dedicated to passionate feeling in their life and work, a dedication inspired by their fascination with Dionysus and grounded in a personal philosophy that anticipates, and later, directly engages Nietzsche. For Michael Field, it was of the utmost importance to represent both one’s own and one’s subject’s feelings in art, and in Chapter 1 I described how they accomplished that goal, especially in their closet drama, through their treatment of anachronism;