Victorian Poetry

HILARY FRASER

from which the woman poet is excluded, Michael Field's epigraphy
legitimizes female creativity and female sexuality through its invocation of
an unimpeachable feminine cultural authority. As Prins observes: "Literally
and figuratively, their Sapphic lyrics are located in the spaces between the
Sapphic fragments - the lacunae in Wharton's text - in order to open a
textual field that Bradley and Cooper may enter together as 'Michael
Field.'" 34
As fragments from which full poems are pieced together, Michael Field's
epigraphs emblematize - in a particularly telling way - the Victorian
historicist project of reconstituting the dismembered fragmentariness of the
historical record. Sappho serves as a figure of the past of which what
remains are only fractured shards, incoherent effects. The realization of
that "delightfully audacious thought" - the extension of Sappho's frag-
ments into lyrics - articulates a broader historiographical desire to recover
in antiquity an imagined originary wholeness that would confer integrity
upon the constituting subject. 35 Even more suggestively, the authorial name
Michael Field, which designates the constructed unitary male voice
speaking for two transgressive women, may be read as both exemplifying
and deconstructing the idea of the modern historicizing and constituting
subject as an agent of integrity and coherence.

IV

This interest in exposing the fabricated identity of both the historical past
and the historicist poet is a feature that may be seen in many other
Victorian poems, if in rather different forms and modes. In particular,
Robert Browning is noted for his poetic exploration of the implications of
historicism's embrace of ambiguity, perspectivism, and plurality. Indeed,
Browning is celebrated for his recognition that, although our access to the
past can only be partial, accidental, and interested, it is nevertheless
valuable to find imaginative ways of entering history as a means of coming
to terms with modernity. In one respect, his poetry enacts the Victorians'
historiographical longing to reintegrate the broken and incomplete remains
of history. His astonishingly metonymic imagination seizes on the frag-
ments of past cultures - an antiquarian book, a bust, a painting, a statue, a
tomb - to conjure up an entire age. In Book I of The Ring and the Book
(1868-69),tne poet-speaker declares:

"I can detach from me, commission forth

Half of my soul; which in its pilgrimage

O'er old unwandered waste ways of the world,

May chance upon some fragment of a whole,

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