‘This hot–house of decadent chronicle’: Michael Field, Nietzsche and the Dance of Modern Poetic Drama

Michael Field's Paratextual Poetics: Portraying a Protomodernist Sappho

“…For Snodgrass, Hughes and other critics, it is Michael Field's collection of ekphrastic poetry, Sight and Song (1892), that particularly anticipates "modernist experiments with improvised metres, open-ended forms and unexpected rhymes" (Snodgrass 2007: 31), and at the same time it serves "as an echo-camber and fore-glimpse of Romantic and Victorian precursors or modernist poets" (Hughes 2010: 575). Also, according to Vadillo (2015), the pre-affiliations between the Fields and the modernists materialise clearly in some of their avant-garde plays -the so-called Roman Trilogy, in particular-that should be integrated "into two new trajectories of the stage that were emerging and would be at the centre of intense debates during the first two decades of the twentieth century: modernist verse drama and ballet" (217).…”

“Come, Dark-eyed Sleep”: Michael Field and the Performance of the Lyric as a Radical Fantasy

“…On the other hand, their dramatic production has also received enthusiastic attention from several other critics. Bickle (2010Bickle ( , 2012, Bristow (2019), Eastham (2011), Kirby (2017), Krisuk (2010), Lee (2019), Olverson (2015), and Parejo- Vadillo (2007Vadillo ( , 2015 have made concerted efforts to amend and revise histories of late-Victorian drama with a view to foregrounding the Fields' plays, appraising their conspicuous originality, and empathically, revealing their intrinsic queer aesthetics. The overall result of this considerable scholarship is a now well-established view that Bradley and Cooper's lyrics and dramas constitute a large-scale repository of fluid, experimental, transgressive forms and ideas that resonate powerfully with our own cultural moment.…”

“…It seems, therefore, that Sappho embraces the Dionysian at the expense of the Apollonian and becomes a possible Nietzschean apologist. This may sound farfetched, but the truth is that the Fields looked up to Nietzsche and upheld many of his aesthetic ideas to the point that, as Vadillo (2015) remarks, they were among the first generation of English intellectuals who "recognised Nietzsche's importance for modernity" (204). It is thus plausible to argue that Sappho's transgressive performance of desire in lyric II amounts to a Dionysian embrace of darkness, deceit, and dangerous dreams.…”