 First edition cover 1932 | |
| Author | Virginia Woolf |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | John Banting |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Hogarth Press |
Publication date | 1932 |
| Pages | 28 pp. |
A Letter to a Young Poet was an epistolary novel by Virginia Woolf, written in 1932 to John Lehman, laying out her views on modern poetry.
In 1932, Woolf responded to a letter from the writer, John Lehmann, about her novel The Waves (1931) in which he asked her to write about her views on modern poetry. Lehmann had a mission to revitalise modern poetry, and came to the Hogarth Press to enlist their help. Virginia was enthusiastic about his suggestion of a "letter to a young poet", which she thought was "most brilliant". [1] Her essay [2] takes the form of an epistolary letter addressed to Lehmann, and was first published in North America in The Yale Review in June 1932, and then by the Hogarth Press as the eighth in their series, The Hogarth Letters, consisting of 12 titles produced between 1931 and 1933. John Banting illustrated the covers. [3]
Following Virginia Woolf's death, Leonard Woolf included the letter in a collection of essays published under the title The Death of the Moth and other Essays (1942). [4]
Woolf expanded the scope to include the art of poetry, literature, and in particular letter writing. In her view letter writing as an art "has only just come into existence". In Woolf's view poetry demands both facility in introspection, as well as a deep understanding of the human species.
"a work of renovation… has to be done from time to time and was certainly needed, for bad poetry is almost always the result of forgetting oneself...all becomes distorted and impure if you lose sight of that central reality"
Woolf argues that indeed it is the intersection of that understanding of oneself and one's understanding of humanity that underlies the essential nature of writing "-now… that poetry has done all this, why should it not once more open its eyes, look out of the window and write about other people?", to be introspective alone is to be "a self that sits alone in the room at night with the blinds drawn". In view of the title, her admonition " And for heaven’s sake, publish nothing before you are thirty" is notable. [4] As elsewhere in her literary criticism, such as "Modern Fiction", she felt that the writer has to come to terms with the reality of everyday life, "the common objects of daily prose—the bicycle and the omnibus". [5] Though nominally addressed to Lehmann, her critique was addressed to a number of young poets of the day, including her nephew, Julian Bell, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis and W.H. Auden. [6]
Lehman felt her understanding of poetry was inadequate, and later parted company with the Woolfs. Her quoted examples have been criticised as not amongst the cited poet's best, a criticism she later accepted. [7]
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer. She is considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.
Victoria Mary, Lady Nicolson, CH, usually known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author and garden designer.
The Hogarth Press is a book publishing imprint of Penguin Random House that was founded as an independent company in 1917 by British authors Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf. It was named after their house in Richmond, in which they began hand-printing books as a hobby during the interwar period.
(Helen) Hope Mirrlees was a British poet, novelist, and translator. She is best known for the 1926 Lud-in-the-Mist, an influential fantasy novel, and for Paris: A Poem (1920), an experimental poem published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press, which critic Julia Briggs deemed "modernism's lost masterpiece, a work of extraordinary energy and intensity, scope and ambition."
Rudolf John Frederick Lehmann was an English publisher, poet and man of letters. He founded the periodicals New Writing and The London Magazine, and the publishing house of John Lehmann Limited.
To the Lighthouse is a 1927 novel by Virginia Woolf. The novel centres on the Ramsay family and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920.
Louis Golding was an English writer, very famous in his time especially for his novels, though he is now largely neglected; he wrote also short stories, essays, fantasies, travel books, and poetry.
William Charles Franklyn Plomer was a South African and British novelist, poet and literary editor. He also wrote a series of librettos for Benjamin Britten. He wrote some of his poetry under the pseudonym Robert Pagan.
Three Guineas is a book-length essay by Virginia Woolf, published in June 1938.
Literary modernism, or modernist literature, originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and is characterized by a self-conscious separation from traditional ways of writing in both poetry and prose fiction writing. Modernism experimented with literary form and expression, as exemplified by Ezra Pound's maxim to "Make it new." This literary movement was driven by a conscious desire to overturn traditional modes of representation and express the new sensibilities of the time. The immense human costs of the First World War saw the prevailing assumptions about society reassessed, and much modernist writing engages with the technological advances and societal changes of modernity moving into the 20th century. In Modernist Literature, Mary Ann Gillies notes that these literary themes share the "centrality of a conscious break with the past", one that "emerges as a complex response across continents and disciplines to a changing world".
Jane Marcus (1938–2015) was a pioneering feminist literary scholar, specializing in women writers of the Modernist era, but especially in the social and political context of their writings. Focusing on Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, and Nancy Cunard, among many others, she devised groundbreaking analyses of Woolf's writings, upending a generation of criticism that ignored feminist, pacifist, and socialist themes in much of Woolf's work and critique of imperialism and bourgeois society. Marcus's understanding of Woolf's place within the larger context of English literature has become prevailing wisdom today in the fields affected by her theorization and research, despite the controversial nature of her positions when they were originally formulated and how much opposition she garnered from earlier scholars and critics.
Sir Stephen Harold Spender was an English poet, novelist and essayist whose work concentrated on themes of social injustice and the class struggle. He was appointed U.S. Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1965.
Monday or Tuesday is a 1921 short story collection by Virginia Woolf published by The Hogarth Press. 1000 copies were printed with four full-page woodcuts by Vanessa Bell. Leonard Woolf called it one of the worst printed books ever published because of the typographical mistakes in it. Most mistakes were corrected for the US edition published by Harcourt Brace. It contained eight stories:
New Writing was a popular literary periodical in book format founded in 1936 by John Lehmann and committed to anti-fascism.
Freshwater: A comedy is a play written and produced by Virginia Woolf in 1935, and the only play she wrote. Although only performed once in her lifetime, it has been translated into many languages and produced in many countries since. Alfred Lord Tennyson appears as a character in this play.
Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown is an essay by Virginia Woolf published in 1924 which explores modernity.
Joan Adeney Easdale was an English poet from Sevenoaks, Kent. Her mother was the author Gladys Ellen Easdale, née Adeney (1875-1970). Her father, Robert Carse Easdale, left her mother during the First World War. Virginia Woolf discerned some "real merit" in her early work.
Paris: A Poem is a long poem by Hope Mirrlees, described as "modernism's lost masterpiece" by critic Julia Briggs. Mirrlees wrote the six-hundred-line poem in spring 1919. Although the title page of the first edition mistakenly has the year 1919, it was first published in 1920 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press. Only 175 copies of the first edition were distributed. In 2011, the poem was reprinted in an edition of Mirrlees's Collected Poems, edited by Sandeep Parmar, which helped create more critical interest.