Michael Field

[i. e. Katherine Harris Bradley u. Edith Emma Cooper]

 

 

Sight and Song

Preface

 

Text
Editionsbericht
Literatur

 

THE aim of this little volume is, as far as may be, to translate into verse what the lines and colours of certain chosen pictures sing in themselves; to express not so much what these pictures are to the poet, but rather what poetry they objectively incarnate. Such an attempt demands patient, continuous sight as pure as the gazer can refine it of theory, fancies, or his mere subjective enjoyment.

'Il faut, par un effort d'esprit, se transporter dans les personnages et non les attirer à soi.' For personnages substitute peintures, and this sentence from Gustave Flaubert's 'Correspondence' resumes the method of art-study from which these poems arose.

[VI] Not even 'le grand Gustave' could ultimately illude himself as a formative power in his work – not after the pain of a lifetime directed to no other end. Yet the effort to see things from their own centre, by suppressing the habitual centralisation of the visible in ourselves, is a process by which we eliminate our idiosyncrasies and obtain an impression clearer, less passive, more intimate.

When such effort has been made, honestly and with persistence, even then the inevitable force of individuality must still have play and a temperament mould the purified impression: –

'When your eyes have done their part,
 Thought must length it in the heart.'

                                            M. F.

February 15, 1892.

 

 

 

 

Erstdruck und Druckvorlage

Michael Field: Sight and Song.
London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane 1892, S. V-VI.

Die Textwiedergabe erfolgt nach dem ersten Druck (Editionsrichtlinien).

URL: https://archive.org/details/sightandsong00fielgoog
URL: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000205644

 

 

 

Literatur

Brandmeyer, Rudolf: Poetiken der Lyrik: Von der Normpoetik zur Autorenpoetik. In: Handbuch Lyrik. Theorie, Analyse, Geschichte. Hrsg. von Dieter Lamping. 2. Aufl. Stuttgart 2016, S. 2-15.

Cameron, Brooke: The Pleasures of Looking and the Feminine Gaze in Michael Field's Sight and Song. In: Victorian Poetry 51.2 (2013), S. 147-175.

Fraser, Hilary: Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge 2014.

Genette, Gérard: Paratexte. Das Buch vom Beiwerk des Buches. Frankfurt a.M. 2001 (= suhrkamp taschenbuch wissenschaft, 1510).

Gracia, Dominique: "The one question is not what you mean but what you do": Michael Field's Ekphrastic Verse. In: Victorian Poetry 57.3 (2019), S. 345-364.

Hall, Jason D. u.a. (Hrsg.): Decadent Poetics. Literature and Form at the British Fin de Siècle. New York 2013 (= Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture).

Hughes, Linda K. (Hrsg.): The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women's Poetry. Cambridge 2019.

Marcus, Laura u.a. (Hrsg.): Late Victorian into Modern. Oxford 2016.

Martus, Steffen u.a. (Hrsg.): Lyrik im 19. Jahrhundert. Gattungspoetik als Reflexionsmedium der Kultur. Bern u.a. 2005 (= Publikationen zur Zeitschrift für Germanistik, 11).

Parker, Sarah / Parejo, Ana (Hrsg.): Michael Field. Decadent Moderns. Athens, OH 2019.

Richardson, LeeAnne: Turn of the Century Women's Poetry: Skirting the Problems of Periodization In: Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 13.3 (2017), S. 81-101.
URL: http://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue133/richardson.htm

Rouxeville, Annie: Victorian Attitudes to Flaubert. An Investigation. In: Nineteenth-Century French Studies 16.1-2 (1987/88), S. 132-140.

Saville, Julia F.: The Poetic Imaging of Michael Field. In: The Fin-de-Siècle poem. English Literary Culture and the 1890s. Hrsg. von Joseph Bristow. Athens 2005, S. 178-206.

Stetz, Margaret D. / Wilson, Cheryl A. (Hrsg.): Michael Field and Their World. High Wycombe 2007.

Thain, Marion / Parejo Vadillo, Ana (Hrsg.): Fin de Siècle Literary Culture and Women Poets. In: Victorian Literature and Culture 34.2 (2006), S. 389-684.

Thain, Marion: "Michael Field". Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge u.a. 2007.

Vadillo, Ana P.: Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism. Passengers of Modernity. Basingstoke 2005.

 

 

Edition
Lyriktheorie » R. Brandmeyer