Rhythm: Breaking the Illusion

Abstract

Where Fry distinguishes the rhythms of life from those of art, in Woolf’s writing the ebb and flow of rhythm seems to pull life into the order of art. In her ‘Letter to a Young Poet’ Woolf champions an elegiac and lyrical rhythmical instinct that has the power to transcend disunity, to make a ‘whole’ out of the ‘separate fragments’ of contemporary experience. Woolf had given a voice to such a young poet in the character of Bernard in The Waves: But it is a mistake, this extreme precision, this orderly and military progress; a convenience, a lie. There is always deep below it, even when we arrive punctually at the appointed time with our white waistcoats and polite formalities, a rushing stream of broken dreams, nursery rhymes, street cries, half-finished sentences and sights — elm trees, willow trees, gardeners sweeping, women writing — that rise and sink even as we hand a lady down to dinner.3 KeywordsLiterary HistoryFigurative LanguageCollective IdentificationPoetic LanguagePsychic LifeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.