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
PURL: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015012356690

 

 

 

Literatur

Alexandre, Didier: Recueil. In: Dictionnaire du lyrique. Poésie, arts, médias. Hrsg. von Antonio Rodriguez. Paris 2024, S. 307-310.

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.

Dever, Carolyn (Hrsg.): One Soul We Divided. A Critical Edition of the Diary of Michael Field. Princeton 2024.

Ehnenn, Jill R.: Michael Field's Revisionary Poetics. Edinburgh 2023.

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

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.

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.

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: "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