T.S.Eliot : 'The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism' 管見

The Essays of Virginia Woolf Volume 5: 1929 to 1932 Ed. Stuart N. Clarke (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2010) xxix + 705pp. The Essays of Virginia Woolf Volume 6: 1933 to 1941 Ed. Stuart N. Clarke (London: Hogarth Press, 2011) xxxi + 736pp. In 1904 Virginia Woolf inaugurated her life as a professional writer with a review of W. D. Howells' The Sons of Royal Langbrith (written, she claimed, in half an hour) and a personal account of her visit to the Bronte parsonage at Haworth (this took longer--somewhat under two hours--to write). The enviable facility of these first ventures was not to last, of course, nor did these fledgling efforts seem especially precocious. Still, they are worth revisiting for intimations of preoccupations that would last a lifetime. The Howells review opens by making a workmanlike distinction between the novel of thought and the novel of action; her "pilgrimage" to Haworth, which she found "dingy and commonplace," causes her to wonder "how far surroundings radically affect people's minds" (E1 5). Thus are introduced two of the major themes that will dominate the great essays to come: one I might call, in my own workmanlike way, the aesthetic theme, in which Woolf explores and ultimately champions the inventive forms, the psychological emphasis, the uncensored subject matter that give modern fiction its power and distinction; the other the socio-political theme, which examines and often laments how baleful environments can affect people's minds, by which she means both their hearts and their imagination. With the recent publication of the final two volumes of Woolf's collected and uncollected essays, reviews and occasional pieces, we at last have an indispensable chronological record of what and when Woolf thought what she did about art, about politics, about human character. Stuart N. Carke has taken over the editorial stewardship of this monumental project from Andrew McNellie, the impeccable, eloquent editor of the first four volumes. Clarke has proved a worthy successor, maintaining the same high standards and practices that made the previous volumes so pleasurable as well as informative to read and consult. Thanks to their exemplary work, we can survey Woolf's essays arrayed majestically from end to end and can appreciate anew and in greater depth how much the modern essay--at once relaxed and exacting--owes to her determination to record as honestly as she could her reactions to books, to social and political issues, to people and to places and to do so, moreover, while acknowledging the importance of mood--of bored or flagging spirits as much as exalted enthusiasms--in accounting for one's opinions, which were, she often reminded us, of the moment. The mood deepens, as does the gravity of her concerns, in the works that make up these last two volumes. Volume 5 includes all the essays written between 1929 and 1932, years following the exhausting labor of The Waves and the impressive polemical achievement of A Room of One's Own. The essays from these years predictably reflect her feminist values and continue her critical assault on the generic boundaries traditionally separating poetry and prose. She is ardent in her appreciation of the vigorous colloquialisms and new coinages of American fiction, which she praises for capturing the freshness and impertinence of contemporary reality. But she continues to be adept at taking the long view, as exemplified in The Common Reader: Second Series, reprinted here in its entirety, which begins with "The Strange Elizabethans" and concludes by attempting to answer the rather timeless question of how one should read a book. The sixth and last volume of the complete essays runs from 1933 to 1941, years that tested but failed to subdue her feminism and pacificism. Three Guineas belongs to this era, as do "Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid" and "The Leaning Tower." Although these essays were written during wartime and while she was battling the debilitating depression that would finally cause her to take her life, there is very little of an end-of-the-world feeling about them. …

The Essays of Virginia Woolf

Sweeney among the Nightingales

In 1917, while suffering from writer’s block following the publication of Prufrock and Other Observations , T.S. Eliot composed six poems in French as a creative experiment. Although four of the poems were subsequently published and remained in print thereafter at the poet’s direction, they have received relatively little critical attention and are typically dismissed as a picturesque detour en route to the annus mirabilis of The Waste Land . But Eliot’s French suite gave voice to new sonorities and tonal registers that would “translate” not only to The Waste Land but also to Four Quartets , while also, curiously, strengthening his ties to the metaphysical poets of the English canon.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.40.1.06

Merrill Turner

Papers

On Not "Not Knowing French": T.S. Eliot's Poetry En Français