A Letter to a Young Poet E-Book

Virginia Woolf

• Herausgeber: Renard Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 41

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'So long as you and you and you, venerable and ancient representatives of Sappho, Shakespeare and Shelley, are aged precisely twenty-three and propose… to spend the next fifty years of your lives in writing poetry, I refuse to think that the art is dead.' Penned in response to a letter about her novel The Waves from a young poet, John Lehmann, A Letter to a Young Poet answers a request for Woolf to set down her views on modern poetry. Written with observational humour and empathy, the letter leaves the reader laughing in recognition of the errors depicted, with the words 'And for heaven's sake, publish nothing before you are thirty' ringing in their ears.

Leseprobe

A Letter to a Young Poet

virginia woolf

renard press

Renard Press Ltd

124 City Road

London EC1V 2NX

United Kingdom

[email protected]

020 8050 2928

www.renardpress.com

A Letter to a Young Poet first published in 1932

This edition first published by Renard Press Ltd in 2024

Edited text, selection and notes © Renard Press Ltd, 2024

Cover design by Will Dady

Renard Press is proud to be a climate positive publisher, removing more carbon from the air than we emit and planting a small forest. For more information see renardpress.com/eco.

All rights reserved. This publication may not be reproduced, used to train artificial intelligence systems or models, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without the prior permission of the publisher.

EU Authorised Representative: Easy Access System Europe – Mustamäe tee 50, 10621 Tallinn, Estonia, [email protected].

contents

A Letter to a Young Poet

Notes

Biographical Note

a letter to a young poet

my dear john,

Did you ever meet, or was he before your day, that old gentleman – I forget his name – who used to enliven conversation, especially at breakfast when the post came in, by saying that the art of letter-writing is dead? The penny post, the old gentleman used to say, has killed the art of letter-writing. Nobody, he continued, examining an envelope through his eyeglasses, has the time even to cross their t’s. We rush, he went on, spreading his toast with marmalade, to the telephone. We commit our half-formed thoughts in ungrammatical phrases to the postcard. Gray is dead, he continued; Horace Walpole is dead; Madame de Sévigné* – she is dead too, I suppose he was about to add, but a fit of choking cut him short, and he had to leave the room before he had time to condemn all the arts, as his pleasure was, to the cemetery. But when the post came in this morning and I opened your letter* stuffed with little blue sheets written all over in a cramped but not illegible hand – I regret to say, however, that several t’s were uncrossed and the grammar of one sentence seems to me dubious – I replied after all these years to that elderly necrophilist – Nonsense. The art of letter-writing has only just come into existence. It is the child of the penny post. And there is some truth in that remark, I think. Naturally when a letter cost half a crown to send, it had to prove itself a document of some importance; it was read aloud; it was tied up with green silk; after a certain number of years it was published for the infinite delectation of posterity. But your letter, on the contrary, will have to be burnt. It only cost three-halfpence to send. Therefore you could afford to be intimate, irreticent, indiscreet in the extreme. What you tell me about poor dear C. and his adventure on the Channel boat is deadly private; your ribald jests at the expense of M. would certainly ruin your friendship if they got about; I doubt, too, that posterity, unless it is much quicker in the wit than I expect, could follow the line of your thought from the roof which leaks (‘splash, splash, splash into the soap dish’) past Mrs Gape, the charwoman, whose retort to the greengrocer gives me the keenest pleasure, via Miss Curtis and her odd confidence on the steps of the omnibus; to Siamese cats (‘Wrap their noses in an old stocking my Aunt says if they howl’); so to the value of criticism to a writer; so to Donne; so to Gerard Hopkins;* so to tombstones; so to goldfish; and so with a sudden alarming swoop to ‘Do write and tell me where poetry’s going, or if it’s dead?’ No, your letter, because it is a true letter – one that can neither be read aloud now, nor printed in time to come – will have to be burnt. Posterity must live upon Walpole and Madame de Sévigné. The great age of letter-writing, which is, of course, the present, will leave no letters behind it. And in making my reply there is only one question that I can answer or attempt to answer in public; about poetry and its death.

But before I begin, I must own up to those