Chapter 5 - Ecphrastic Questions: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Michael Field

Summary

Chapter 5 considers ecphrasis less as an anxious competition between visual and verbal arts than as another form of sociable relations between persons and things. The chapter looks especially at collections by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (“Sonnets for Picture”) and the two women poet-lovers who wrote together as Michael Field, Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper (Sight and Song). Following the example of Keats, these poets used grammatical questions (whose ecphrastic uses go back to classical epigrams and idylls) to structure their encounters with works of visual art. Embodying vision in both conversational syntax and poetic (and sometimes typographic) form served their larger efforts to restructure social and sexual relations in the politically charged moment of 1848 (for Rossetti) and at the end of the century (for Michael Field). They sought to draw works of art out of commodity relations and into something that looked like conversation, repersonalizing and reimagining the forms of sociability in which objects and persons might participate.