Category: Biographical

The Poetic Drama of Michael Field

Though perhaps better known for their poetry – Long Ago (1889), Sight and Song (1892) and Underneath the Bough (1893) to name a few – the Fields were large contributors to the world of fin de siecle poetic drama. An argument may even be made that they were one of the most important and prolific verse dramatists of their time.

Vadillo writes that:

“Reading the poetic dramas of ‘Michael Field’ … one is continuously astonished by the extravagant plots, the audacity of their verse, and the uncontained character of their plays … The breadth of history and scholarship is bewildering, with plays rooted formally and thematically in the traditions of Classical Greek, Latin, Medieval, Renaissance, and Romantic poetic drama.” [1]

Certainly, their coverage of European culture is vast, and the intellectual depth of each play is astounding to a modern audience. While the twenty-first century has lost its appetite for poetic drama and it is, as Vadillo says, seemingly “a dead genre” [2], the Fields remind us just how significant dramatic verse could be to an interested late nineteenth-century audience. In a time of shifting literary tastes and experimental form, the Fields attempt to assimilate this traditional format into the realm of modernist thought. In a way, it can be said that they attempted to use the ‘old’ to communicate the ‘new’ (putting “Old Wine in New Bottles“, to borrow a name of one of Edith Cooper’s unpublished plays from 1892). Their modernist voice was appropriating historical myth and literature through poetic drama.

A Timeline of Published Poetic Drama

The best known and first published entries of dramatic verse written by Michael Field are Callirrhoë (1884) and Fair Rosamund (1884) which recieved a positive reception. These dramas employed hellenism as a scholarly, respected discourse allowing them to subversively author notions of same-sex passions and pleasures. Immediately the poetic verse reminded readers of Swinburnian ballads and poems from twenty years earlier, which had also enjoyed hellenic subjects and revelled in mad, irrational Greeks. (This would come of no surprise later in their literary career, when Michael Field reveal that they were devotees of the work of Swinburne).

Kindly reception for the Fields’ early literary career

They also published The Father’s Tragedy (1885), William Rufus (1885) and Loyalty or Love? (1885) following that. Untiring, they continued to bring Brutus Ultor (1886) and Canute the Great (1887), with The Cup of Water (1887) squeezed out just after.

However, as the identity of the two women behind ‘Michael Field’ became more widely known, the Fields began to attract growing negative criticism. They did not back down in the face of scathing reviews and harsh remarks but the 1890s marked a more intense desire for the lyrical at the cost of the dramatic. As Vadillo puts it, the “decadent 1890s brought to this avante-garde poet a difficult battle: to make the genre matter again or disappear” [3]. Fewer and fewer readers were drifting towards Scottish kings and the dramatis personae of England’s eleventh-century royals found in the likes of Fair Rosamund and Loyalty or Love?. They were craving newer, fresher subjects.

‘The Race of Leaves’ as illustrated by Charles Ricketts. (1901 edition, Hacon & Ricketts, New York: John Lane)

So too then did the Fields’ tastes change a little. But this was not by bringing in modern history. The Tragic Mary (1890) was their last renaissance play before they moved further back in time to a more Roman-centric sphere, churning out a ‘Roman Trilogy’ of sorts – The World at Auction(1898), The Race of Leaves (1901) and Julia Domna (1903). For Bradley and Cooper, this meant revisiting their Homeric and Virgilian learning, but more importantly, revisiting the themes of their original debut Callirrhoë which celebrated a Grecian cult dedicated to Dionysus, the god of winemaking, madness and theatre among other practices. In this spirit of rebelliousness, the writings of the Fields took a noticeable change for the turn of the century.

Notably, they had to be careful in distributing this kind of content after the trails of Oscar Wilde, since Latin decadence as they were dabbling in was under attack and hefty scrutiny. But this did not stop them from re-conceptualising the genre of dramatic verse from this decadent angle. They also began to adopt the philological criticism of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s newly reissued The Birth of Tragedy (1886) philosophised the cultural binaries of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, which again allowed them to touch back on Callirrhoë and the mad Dionysus. In fact, the Fields even often referred to themselves as ‘maenads’ – female followers of Dionysus – in their private letters, playing with the concept of themselves as ‘mad women’.

Original German copy of Nietzsche’s ‘The Birth of Tragedy’, 1872

One of the things Nietzsche had considered which became equally apparent to them through their talks with close friend Bernard Berenson was the issue of giving historically-derived plays secular meaning. As Vadillo remarks, these “talks, which Cooper recorded in their diary, were important for Michael Field because they helped them articulate the problem they were dealing with in their verse dramas: how to make historical plays be about life, not history” [4]. As the tastes of the literary masses were changing, the direction of authors and their works had to change too. Everyday readers wanted historical material that was in some way relatable. The format had to adapt, and the Fields felt that Nietzsche understood this as they did.

The year 1890 was also the year that the papal apartments used by Pope Alexander VI, Rodrigo Borgia, were opened to the public for the first time since his death in 1503. The Fields had much to consider and write on this front. They published Borgia (1905) as a tribute to the new emerging information and resurfacing rumours surrounding the historical Borgia legacy.

The 1890s also brought Stephania, a Trialogue(1892), A Question of Memory (1893) and after a pause in literary inspiration, Attila, My Attila(1896). Despite their difficulties in finding motivation at the hands of turmoil in their personal and aesthetic lives, the Fields also managed to publish World At Auction (1898) alongside help from their friend Charles Ricketts over at the Vale Press, swiftly accompanied by Noontide Branches(1899) and Anna Ruina (1899) in the year after.

It was also during this turning of the century that Edith Cooper became curious about Catholicism and lost her father who died in 1899. His death allowed them to purchase a new residence. Then, thrusting forward into the new twentieth century, the Fields – mostly Edith Cooper to begin with – began to contemplate a conversion to Catholicism, though they would not become Roman Catholics until 1907.

After a tumultuous 1890s for themselves and their literary career, the Fields continued to suffer a somewhat waning legacy and they conversed with fewer friends. History has been rather unkind to the Fields, by this point regarding them as merely “pathetic literary hangers on” [5] to quote Emma Donoghue, their status as illustrious aesthetes dissolving. But still they wrote and still they published verse drama, bringing about a more cheerful Wild Honey from Various Thyme (1908) and Queen Mariamne (1908). This was followed by a constant string of verse drama all in the same year: Tragedy of Pardon (1911), Tristan de Léonois (1911), Dian (1911), The Accuser(1911) and The Messiah (1911).

Sadly, Edith Cooper had passed away as a result of cancer by 1913, with Katherine Bradley passing away shortly after. It was not until after their deaths that Ras Byzance (1918), Deirdre (1918) and finally In The Name of Time (1919) were published.

Of course, in the midst of all this verse drama there were various love poems written to one another, journal entries written, scrapbooks created, familial upheaval, continental journeys, poetry collections published, reviews written and other projects undertaken. The lives of Bradley and Cooper were busy ones and their words span more than simply the volumes of verse we have touched on here. The verse they wrote was in some ways a chronicling and forging of individual milestones marking passages and transformations in their own lives.

Footnotes

[1] Ana Parejo Vadillo, “‘The hot-house of decadent chronicle’: Michael Field, Nietzsche and the Dance of Modern Poetic Drama,” in Women: A Cultural Review 26, No. 3, (2015): 1.

[2] Vadillo, “’The hot-house of decadent chronicle’: Michael Field, Nietzsche and the Dance of Modern Poetic Drama,” in Women: A Cultural Review 26, 2.

[3] Vadillo, “‘The hot-house of decadent chronicle’: Michael Field, Nietzsche and the Dance of Modern Poetic Drama,” in Women: A Cultural Review 26, page 2.

[4] Vadillo, “‘The hot-house of decadent chronicle’: Michael Field, Nietzsche and the Dance of Modern Poetic Drama,” in Women: A Cultural Review 26, page 8.

[5] Emma Donoghue, “Introduction,” in We are Michael Field, (Absolute Press: Bath, 1998), 7.

What is ‘Sight and Song’?

“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.”

— Sight and Song preface

What makes Sight and Song unique as a poetry collection is its relationship with historical images. The collection is created from a series of visual encounters with paintings, which at the time would have been viewed within continental galleries and private collections. These poems are “songs” emerging from “sights” – they come from the sensations produced from observing, from channelling the emotional passions and desires evoked from viewing into words. Some have remarked upon the somewhat lyrical nature of the verse, attributing a musical rhythm to the inflection associated with the structure of these poems. Perhaps Sight and Song was intended to be read as simultaneously something of a songbook. Either way, Bradley and Cooper expected their readers to already know the surrounding narrative and subject matter of each poem – each verse is dedicated to well known pieces, among them La Gioconda and Primavera – and their poem titles ‘frame’ select biographical details pertaining to these images.

Masterfully, the Fields oscillate their poems in Sight and Song from objective to subjective perspective. Incorporating these alternate perspectives accesses simultaneously a psychological point of view and a historically sublime one. It allows the Fields to “objectively incarnate” the intricacies of the historical event a painter is depicting but equally maintain a finer, more human lens, illuminating the more innate qualities of the picture we perhaps did not notice before. Upon reading their poems, one immediately will have to re-inspect the painting, for they illuminate details previously obscured – such is the beauty of ‘seeing’ through another’s poetic gaze. By these means, the Fields revisualise and reinvent the paintings through the poems.

Bernard Berenson, though conversing about other aspects of the Fields’ work, metaphorically claimed that the Fields were “putting new wine in old bottles” [1]. Sight and Song does just that; it communicates new and decadent wine thoughts through the old historical bottles of time.

This blog examines two poems from Sight and Song, La Gioconda and The Rescue.

Footnotes

[1] Martha Vicinus, “Faun Love: Michael Field and Bernard Berenson,” in Women’s History Review 18, No. 5 (November 2009): 755.