The two women who wrote as “Michael Field”

The poetic genius—tortured, solitary—is a familiar figure. Some of the concept’s staying power comes from simple wonder: The best poetry makes us marvel at the human spirit’s ability to use language in such extraordinary or unusual ways, whether it’s “’twas brillig, and the slithy toves” or “beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth” or “my Life had stood—a Loaded Gun.” We tend to be stunned, transported, floored by creativity when we encounter it—which is why the clichés of AI-generated art and poetry still amuse rather than move us.

I’ve had ample opportunity to think about the poetic process this spring: I’ve been reading every poem published in The Atlantic since the magazine ran its first issue, in November 1857. So I was delighted to find, in the September and October 1895 issues, two poems by Michael Field. Field was neither a man nor a single person, but rather two women using a single name. Their story complicates the notion that good poetry springs only from a Yeats dreaming in a tower, or a Whitman walking on a beach at night.

The two poets who wrote as “Michael Field” were a niece and her aunt, Edith Emma Cooper and Katherine Harris Bradley. They described themselves as married, slept in the same bed, and have generally been understood to be romantically (incestuously) involved. Copious amounts of their own recently republished diary, and interpretive scholarship by feminists and LGBTQ writers, testify to their relationship. Male pseudonyms were hardly unknown in the 19th century—George Sand and George Eliot were both women—but I haven’t come across any other example of two women in an intimate relationship using the name of a man.

“Field” wrote their poetry in dialogue with two of the leading writers and thinkers (and Atlantic contributors) of the day: the art critic and connoisseur Bernard Berenson and the Victorian poet Robert Browning. They also corresponded with the playwright Oscar Wilde, whose trial for homosexuality was a cause célèbre of 1895. This was the era of “art for art’s sake,” of Walter Pater’s swoon-worthy prose about the Renaissance, of Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings for Wilde’s Salome. Field contributed their poetry, plays, and prose to this heady atmosphere, in which beauty was a topic of heated debate. Visiting Berenson in Italy, Field writes in their diary: “My definition of beauty was—that in the (objective) world that attracts emotion.”

The Atlantic published only two poems by Field: “Tiger-Lilies” and “Second Thoughts.” Both are gems, innovative for their day, and still arresting for ours. The topic of the first poem, “Tiger-Lilies,” doesn’t necessarily make it stand out; poems about flowers were not exactly unknown in the 19th-century Atlantic. (If you want to read several dozen poems from the 1880s about the arbutus, I can steer you in the right direction.) But Field’s poem struck me immediately with its over-the-top, rhapsodic free-fall, repeating words and careening back and forth between long lines and short phrases. The final stanza offers a good example of Field’s play with rhyme and rhythm:

In these lines, I notice the sheer delight in the immediate satisfaction of rhyme—wonder/under—and then again in the delayed satisfaction of the following rhyme, heaves/leaves. Maybe reciting the poem is the verbal equivalent of the pleasure of encountering the vivid orange flower, and so much physical attraction, all at once. The lines are dizzying, decadent. They pull back, three times, only to burst forth in the final line.

I imagine the second poem, “Second Thoughts,” which appeared in the magazine a month later, as a response to “Tiger-Lilies.” Where “Tiger-Lilies” whirls around an image, “Second Thoughts” is a dramatic monologue (perhaps influenced by the famous Browning, whom the poets called “The Old.”). The setting is morning in a bedroom. One lover is awake earlier than the other. She’s thinking about going out for the day, but only so that she can come back and have some stories to tell, a “thousand things to say.” Then she falls into a beautiful state of distraction:

The lines move forward by developing the metaphor. First, the “world” that is the face, then the “mine” that are the (black) eyes, then the “glittering” spa waters that are the “iris.” The “shine” of the eyes belongs, in an astonishing leap, to a zoo animal who turns into a character in a fairy tale, enchanted by a spell. Needless to say, no one gets out of bed.

Of course these poems are about a flower and a morning after (or before, or both). But at some point they get hijacked by their true subject, which is the state of ecstasy, the total absorption and immersion that beauty can create. The experience of beauty, the appreciation of a flower or a lover, isn’t a selfish or solitary one here—there’s no wandering “lonely as a cloud” for Michael Field. “It is the wonder / I am laid under”: The self is overtaken, pulled under, distracted to the point of vanishing.

I could look at the controversial personal lives of Bradley and Cooper to explain the pseudonym, or try to conjecture about the effect of adopting a male name in the artistic milieu of the 1890s. But the two poems here offer another explanation for their choice to write as one person. Beauty attracts emotion. Emotion draws you out of yourself. Writing poetry, for Field, requires more than one mind and heart at work. The dual pseudonym of “Michael Field” is more than a name. It’s a claim about the source of poetry and the collateral benefit that the encounter with beauty brings—not access to the truth, but submersion in love.