A Room of One’s Own, Woolf’s “little book on poetry”

In several essays concurrent with her major experimental works of the 1920s, Woolf proclaims that the novel will usurp the tools and the place of poetry. Most important among these essays is the book-length A Room of One’s Own (1929). Here Woolf identifies the lack of poet foremothers available as models to women writers. She urges young women to fill this gap by writing not poetry per se, but rather prose whose greatness qualifies it as “poetry.” Woolf wants to gain for prose, and by extension women writers, the prestige historically accorded to verse. This chapter sketches the historic link among English Studies, poetry, and patriarchy. This link contributed to Woolf’s vision of the novel as the democratic, feminist alternative to poetry. It also spurred her subtle challenge in A Room of One’s Own to Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who had doubted women’s ability to write poetry. This chapter concludes by considering the real women poets who inspired Woolf’s fiction of Judith Shakespeare.

The Waves as “saturated” Novel

Since Jacob’s Room, Woolf’s fiction had incorporated three tools borrowed from poetry: the lyric “I,” figurative language, and aural recurrence. These tools find their clearest expression in The Waves (1931), which Woolf described as “prose yet poetry; a novel & a play.” This chapter analyzes The Waves with respect to these three tools, and then considers the book’s genre. Since its publication, many critics have received it—and other work by Woolf—as prose poetry and free verse. But to read Woolf as writing in these genres is to disregard authorial intent and historical context, to impose associations and conventions on work conceived without them. And lineating Woolf’s prose to “reveal” it as free verse betrays a confusion of lineation with poetry. Woolf’s vexation with the word “novel” reflects her effort to expand the meaning of the term. One way to honor this expansion is to use the term to describe the work of hers that seems least novel-like.

Woolf and the Thirties Poets

Studying Woolf’s relationship with the British male poets who first came to public attention in the 1930s clarifies tensions of the time concerning gender, generations, and, especially, literary form. The poetry of W. H. Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, John Lehmann, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender provoked Woolf’s criticism in large part for a reason that has received little attention, Woolf’s competition with poetry. This spirit of competition was not matched by the 1930s poets themselves. While Woolf’s criticism prompted the poets’ counter-arguments, Woolf’s fiction stirred only the young poets’ admiration, and in some cases imagination, both in her lifetime and after. This chapter looks at Woolf’s “A Letter to a Young Poet,” the poets’ response to Woolf in letters, poetry, and criticism, Woolf’s essay “The Leaning Tower” (1941), and the poets’ writing on Woolf after her death.

Epilogue

Toward the end of her life, Woolf’s resentment of the male poetic tradition and rivalry with the poetic present were displaced by affection for this tradition and for the deep poetic past. This attitude comes through in “Anon” (1979), an essay that honors the anonymous poets of medieval England, and in Between the Acts (1941), in which a country pageant surveying British history draws an anxious community together. Having drawn on the tools of lyric poetry in earlier works, now Woolf includes original poetry of her own, both lyric and dramatic. Manuscript drafts reveal how the lyric poetry evolved. It was initially allusive, polyvocal, and sometimes in verse. In the published novel, it is less allusive, monovocal, and exclusively in prose. The elegiac tone of Between the Acts manifested privately, as well: Woolf’s late letters and diaries are full of allusions to canonical British elegies. Woolf’s farewell to poetry serves as the farewell to this book.

The Male Siskin and his Dear Aunt

Julian Bell, a poet and Woolf’s nephew, was a friendly aggravation generative to some of Woolf’s most significant work. Both the content and the form of The Waves (1931) owe much to Woolf’s relationship with him. With regard to content, the book’s depiction of college life and of young male poets derives in part from Bell’s social world and personality. With regard to form, Woolf’s association of poetry with metaphoric thought was reinforced by Bell’s literal verse. The drafts of The Waves and of a lampoon Woolf wrote on Bell inform the latter argument. This chapter then shows that in writing “A Letter to a Young Poet” (1932), Woolf had in mind her nephew’s “The Progress of Poetry: A Letter to a Contemporary” (1930). This chapter concludes with a study of the manuscript draft of “A Letter to a Young Poet.” Here Woolf writes as though the poet and the novelist have the same task—which, I argue, they do not.

Orlando’s Celebration of “prose not verse”

In Woolf’s literary history, the eighteenth century saw the male writer and poetry begin to cede power and popularity to the female writer and the novel. Orlando (1928) personifies this literary history with the title character, a nobleman-poet who turns from man to woman in the eighteenth century, while his/her poetry turns from tolerable to bathetic. Some of the adventures of the newly female Orlando take their inspiration from the novels of Daniel Defoe and the life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Woolf draws on Defoe and Lady Montagu to underscore the mutual ascent of women and prose. Orlando is based primarily, of course, on Vita Sackville-West. Allusions in the novel to Sackville-West’s long poem The Land (1926) betray Woolf’s dim view of her lover’s poetry and the conventional, sentimental poet figure more generally, and argue that a woman poet after the eighteenth century writes in a form poorly suited to her era and her sex.

“why is poetry wholly an elderly taste?”

Woolf’s sense that the novel must respond to poetry is manifest in her first three novels—The Voyage Out (1915), Night and Day (1919), and Jacob’s Room (1922). In the first, she shows a keen ear for the sound of language, but poetry figures as patriarchal and arguably deadly. In the second, she explores conflicting attitudes toward the English poetic tradition, and poetry occupies a dual role, at once burden and aphrodisiac. And in the third, poetry serves as a tool Woolf adapts for her own use in prose. For four reasons, by 1922 Woolf was able to appreciate poetry of the past: a familiarity with contemporary poetry gained by printing at The Hogarth Press, the deaths of family members who had nurtured poetry’s discouraging associations, an interest in elegy after the personal loss of her brother and the collective loss during World War I, and a comfort with poetry’s techniques in the wake of the form’s diminished power. Strong evidence of Woolf’s turn toward poetry lies in the poetry books in her extant library.

“the Author disdained poetry”

As a young woman, Virginia Stephen associated poetry with a patriarchal imagination, due to the overbearing declamations of her father, Leslie Stephen, the Cambridge education in poetry of her older brother, Thoby Stephen, and the misogynistic verse of her cousin J. K. Stephen. These family members’ love of poetry seemed of a piece with their participation in the world of educated, admired men, while their mental instability shaded poetry as perilous as well as patriarchal. This chapter examines the poetry in Virginia Stephen’s world, and ends by studying her early book reviews of poetry.

Introduction

Perceptions surrounding literary genres and forms can influence writing practice. If poetry is perceived as exalted, one might read and write it for the challenge or the cachet, or avoid it out of intimidation. If novels are perceived as unpretentious, one might read and write them to join the mainstream, or prefer other genres precisely to avoid the mainstream. The career of Virginia Woolf offers an excellent case study of how cultural associations with literary genres and forms influence reading and writing practice. The Introduction to Virginia Woolf and Poetry traces the long rivalry between prose and verse, and more particularly the novel and poetry. It then describes the genre rivalry among British and American modernist writers, and surveys Woolf’s knowledge of the poetry of her time. It concludes by acknowledging the relevant scholarship.