关键词:
麥可.菲爾德
藝作描述
美學
詩歌
視覺與詩歌
摘要:
This paper explores ekphrastic poetry written by "Michael Field," the joint male pseudonym of two women poets, Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper. It discusses Sight and Song (1892), Michael Field's first collection of lyrics, which contains thirty-one ekphrastic poems written during their visit to several major museums and galleries of Europe in the early 1890s. Michael Field in Sight and Song demonstrate their passion for art, responding in writing to paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Giorgione, and many other "old masters." Their work epitomized the importance of ekphrasis, as practiced by John Keats, D. G. Rossetti, A. C. Swinburne, and Walter Pater. Yet their independent spirit leads them to new ways of expressing and reflecting on aesthetic ideas. My discussion begins with Pater's aesthetic discourses about sight, to examine Michael Field's relationship with Victorian ways of seeing and their subversion of them. What characterizes Michael Field's work is an inclination to explore their own poetic language without giving up the possibility of engaging with the aesthetic project of their male counterparts. On the surface, Michael Field's poetry appears to fit the pattern of Aesthetic poetry, and constantly resorting to ekphrasis as a mode of self-reflection. Yet, if we examine their poetry in the context of its allusions or borrowings from their male counterparts, a rather different picture emerges, one which suggests their familiarity with the Aesthetic tradition, but also their resistance to some of its assumptions. The paper situates their innovative, revisionary work between British Aesthetic tradition and subversion.