Ekphrastic Poetics in and after Sight and Song

This chapter argues that, through the queer feminist revisionary poetics in Sight and Song, Michael Field’s ekphrases perform metaleptic leaps that, in their shift from image to word, test the boundaries of objective/formalist vs. subjective/anti-formalist modes of interacting with art and complicate the presumption of paragone, or rivalry, between the sister arts of painting and poetry. They negotiate their outsider status as authoritative viewers of art, challenge the notion of the autonomous art object and the notion of the universal spectator, bring anti-patriarchal and anti-heteronormative interpretations to the venerable art-objects they contemplate, and demonstrate how ekphrasis can be much more synaesthetic—and in particular, haptic-- than solely visual. Further, much of Michael Field’s ekphrastic work in and after Sight and Song was in dialogue with other late-nineteenth-century theories of vision and the senses, theories that anticipate phenomenology in the tradition of Merleau-Ponty. The second portion of this chapter moves beyond Sight and Song to address Michael Field's continued employment of ekphrasis in their later writing and gestures toward the rise of modernist ekphrastic writing that, to varying degrees, resonated with Michael Field’s verse.