"A larger vision": William Blake, Phoebe Anna Traquair, and the Visual Imagination in EBB's Sonnets from the Portuguese

Abstract

"A larger vision":William Blake, Phoebe Anna Traquair, and the Visual Imagination in EBB's Sonnets from the Portuguese Clare Broome Saunders (bio) In the 1888 essay "English Poetesses," Oscar Wilde considers that the chief qualities of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's1 work is its "sincerity and strength" and hails EBB as "an imperishable glory to our literature."2 He praises particularly the sociopolitical and cultural function of her poetry, which, as Marjorie Stone and Beverly Taylor suggest, is "especially notable in an author himself known as an apostle of aestheticism."3 However, Wilde also considers EBB's ambitious and visionary poetic ideal, which he cannot find in work by her contemporaries, such as Christina Rossetti, "the very delightful artist in poetry" (p. 81). The poetics of force and energy that he finds in EBB's work make her "unapproachable" by her peers: "Beyond it and above it are higher and more sunlit heights of song, a larger vision, and an ampler air, a music at once more passionate and more profound, a creative energy that is born of the spirit, a winged rapture that is born of the soul, a force and fervour of mere utterance that has all the wonder of the prophet, and not a little of the consecration of the priest" (p. 81). Four years later, when the Edinburgh-based artist Phoebe Anna Traquair (1852–1936) embarked on an ambitious and intricate project to illustrate EBB's Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), which she would eventually complete in January 1897, she focuses precisely on this visual excess of EBB's poetic imagination.4 Born Phoebe Anna Moss in Dublin, Traquair was inspired by childhood visits to the medieval manuscripts housed at Trinity College, particularly to see the Book of Kells, to pursue a career in art. This led to her introduction to her future husband, the Scottish paleontologist Dr. Ramsay Heatley Traquair, who was seeking an illustrator for his research papers; the two married and moved to Edinburgh in 1874, and Traquair illustrated her husband's papers for the next thirty years.5 However, Traquair's main artistic inspiration came from [End Page 521] literature: fascinated by the interaction between the poetic and the visual imagination, she forged a career as an illustrator and illuminator, grounded in her early experience of medieval manuscripts. In 1887, Traquair wrote to John Ruskin for advice on medieval illumination, sparking several months of correspondence during which Ruskin loaned her several thirteenth-century manuscripts from his library for studying and copying, which Traquair returned with copies, along with original works of her own and discussions of poets like Walt Whitman (Cumming, pp. 18–19). Traquair's long artistic career saw her move to work on large-scale murals, embroidery, and enamel jewelry as well as book illustration, and she became one of the first women elected to the Royal Scottish Academy in 1920. Throughout all her work, her main creative purpose was to celebrate the potential of the human mind and spirit: she was drawn to authors such as Dante in whose work she saw the ideal synaesthetic combination of the visual, poetic, and musical. From the 1890s, Traquair was increasingly inspired by the work of D. G. Rossetti, whose The House of Life was, for her, "a modern counterpart to Dante's La Vita Nuova" (Cumming, p. 41). Like Rossetti, she valued William Blake's poetry and art as inspirational, using his illustrations repeatedly as sources for her illuminations and murals (Cumming, p. 34).6 Blake appears alongside John the Baptist, Tennyson, Lord Lister, and Louis Pasteur in her final mural scheme, commissioned for the Manners Chapel, All Saints Church, Thorney Hill in 1920; as Traquair wrote to her sister Amelia, the portraits she included were of those who "sing the Te Deum, tho' they don't often know it." To her, the "Te Deum" meant "every beautiful and every fine thing" (Cumming, p. 90). Traquair's illustrations for Sonnets from the Portuguese expose striking connections between Blake's work and EBB's sonnet sequence, illuminating the ways in which EBB develops and refines Blake's celebration of excess and the visual imagination. There are many obvious connections between the...