Virginia Woolf and Poetry

Virginia Woolf’s career was shaped by her impression of the conflict between poetry and the novel, a conflict she often figured as one between masculine and feminine, old and new, bound and free. Woolf considered poetry the rival genre to the novel. A book on Woolf’s sense of genre rivalry thus offers a thorough reinterpretation of the motivations and aims of her canonical work. Written in clear and lively language, the book maintains a narrative drive as it traces Woolf’s thinking about poetry over her lifetime, including her response to poets and critics in her circle such as J. K. Stephen, Julian Bell, Vita Sackville-West, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, T. S. Eliot, Stephen Spender, and W. H. Auden. Virginia Woolf and Poetry will appeal to anyone interested in Victorian literature, modernism, the novel, poetry, and literary history, for its suggestions of how cultural associations with literary forms influence reading and writing practice.