Dalloway Day 2023 correction

 

Woolf and Eliot

 Clarifying briefly, my observation yesterday that discussing good and bad writing takes us to more complex questions will, I’m sure, seem simplistic. Obviously, a large part of literary studies and other disciplines for that matter are “about” such complexities. The essay by T. S. Eliot I mentioned in fact implies some of these matters in terms of whether or not the critic/poet “of our own time, with its elaborate equipment of science and psychological analysis, is even less fitted than the Victorian age to appreciate poetry as poetry.” Virginia Woolf—and a great many people along with her and with Eliot—was asking herself some of the same questions. By 1927, when To the Lighthouse was published, these two Anglo-Modernist writers had developed rather different answers. However a longer commentary on this will have to wait as I am currently outside Barcelona and unable to consult the source books needed to do it proper justice. 

 

 

Dalloway Day 2023

 

I intended to post this salutation closer to this year’s Dalloway Day celebration, in mid-June. Excuses follow, but perhaps it will be of some interest as it stands.

 

More ideas about the poetic aspect of Virginia Woolf’s fiction have come as I’ve gone on with re-reading The Waves. Poetic obviously has different meanings. Poetry or verse, as we might also call poetry that isn’t prose. T. S. Eliot, in a short article titled Poetry in the English Century uses both words. He is writing there about the Augustan writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (depending on how one defines that period). But notably for my short comment here Eliot emphasises the fact that good poets can also write good prose and good prose writers can also write good poetry,

 

One thing that strikes me about this topic in general is that it leads us to other considerations about the successful/unsuccessful features of what we consider to be good writing.

 

And when we start on such additional considerations we are bound to go into ethical questions, political issues, and such. The conversation then becomes longer. But especially in times of crisis like those we face today it is a worthwhile one. Happy Dalloway Day!