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!