#edith cooper

A Girl

A Girl,

     Her soul a deep-wave pearl

Dim, lucent of all lovely mysteries;

     A face flowered for heart’s ease,

     A brow’s grace soft as seas

     Seen through faint forest-trees:

     A mouth, the lips apart,

Like aspen-leaflets trembling in the breeze

     From her tempestuous heart.

     Such: and our souls so knit,

     I leave a page half-writ —

           The work begun

Will be to heaven’s conception done,

           If she come to it.  (1893)

I never heard of them until graduate school, despite having spent almost all my time before them studying literature. They were simply not included in the story of history I got--even in the English Department at Barnard, a women's college. They are more widely anthologized and taught now, which I think is great. Their poetry is interesting, their biography is interesting, and the way these interact is fascinating. I've been interested in non-unitary, complex (sometimes queer) models of authorship for a long time now, but while novels have long been understood (by scholars) as a  porous, collaborative affair, one influential theorist of the novel (Mikhail Bakhtin) argued for the dialogic nature of the novel as opposed to the monologic nature of poetry. Now. That's a gross oversimplification of poetry (as if it were one thing!), even of the kind of lyric poetry that seems to speak through an "I"--but Michael Field just blows that straw man all to hell. I remember coming across "A Girl" and thinking, "See? Fuck you, Bakhtin."

I'm writing about poems from a different collection, looking at one on Watteau in the context of French poets who responded to the same painting and examining how these poetic responses contribute to Aestheticist understandings of visual-verbal relations. I'm just writing an abstract now, so who knows what it will really say.