Virginia Woolf and Poetry by Emily Kopley

Abstract

Reviewed by: Virginia Woolf and Poetry by Emily Kopley Benjamin Bagocius VIRGINIA WOOLF AND POETRY, by Emily Kopley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. 393 pp. $85.00 hardback. In To the Lighthouse (1927), Virginia Woolf writes, "Nothing was simply one thing" (qtd. in Kopley, p. 220). Woolf's thoughts on poetry are no exception. At turns characterized by reverence and revulsion, Woolf's relationship to poetry is always, as Emily Kopley explores in Virginia Woolf and Poetry, defined by "fascination," as perhaps most stormy love affairs are (p. 27). While Woolf's "argument with contemporary novelists is well known, . . . less well known and studied is Woolf's debate with poetry as form and term" (p. 3). Kopley's study unfolds the ways in which poetry as a genre is "decisive for interpreting Woolf's work" and for understanding more vividly Woolf's feminism across her essays, novels, diary entries, and letters (p. 3). As Kopley explains, "Woolf's attitude toward poetry evolved over her lifetime, informing"—inspiring, provoking—"her work at every stage" (p. 27). Woolf is widely regarded as modernism's most lyrical novelist. Contemporary poets tended to laud her novels as poetic, and scholars today commonly align Woolf's prose with poetry, some calling The Waves (1931) "a long prose-poem" and even an expression of "free verse" (p. 191). Poetry and Woolf thus may seem to make a perfect rather than tumultuous couple. Yet Kopley finds that Woolf's allegiance—for feminist reasons associated with gender, imaginative freedom, and class—remains with the novel and decidedly not with poetry. Kopley's study explores the ways "Woolf drew on the word 'poetry' . . . yet distanced herself from the word . . . so as to distinguish her genre, the novel, from one [poetry] she considered currently egotistical and didactic" (p. 271). Woolf's aversion to name her novels in terms of poetry as she strives to write lyrical prose demonstrates her complicated relationship with verse. In examining Woolf's critique of poetry, Kopley illustrates Woolf's belief that much of what goes by poetry is more obedient to masculinism than to meaning, depth, and beauty (p. 266). Woolf finds verse too often trapped in a solipsistic "lyric 'I'" that avoids exploring interiorities beyond the poet's subjectivity (p. 187). Kopley explains that "the formal constraints [End Page 354] of verse, compared with the inviting freedom of prose . . . look to Woolf like fetters," "mechanical and old-fashioned" (p. 77). The lovers of poetry in Woolf's early life were men—her father Leslie Stephen, brother Thoby, and cousin J. K. Stephen—and the poets they "celebrated were all men" (pp. 39, 41). The poetry that Leslie recited both in Woolf's upbringing and throughout To the Lighthouse as the character Mr. Ramsay reinforces masculinist orthodoxies such as the glorification of war and ideas about "powerless women" (p. 41). In Kopley's estimation, Woolf thus "judges" verse "form as persistently inhospitable to" women and thus "outdated" for modern reality (p. 135). Oppositely, Kopley argues that Woolf understands prose as a form of "daring inclusiveness" that welcomes a range of voices, especially women's, and hence is better suited for a modern age (p. 29). Woolf finds the novel's capacity to include voices beyond the "lyric 'I'" and its exploration of content beyond "male ego and power" to be more "democratic," less class-and gender-bound than verse and its "tower-dwellers, [male] poets" (pp. 39, 270, 259). Yet because of its more inclusive history, the prose tradition has not enjoyed the same cultural prestige as verse. Kopley explains that "Woolf wants to gain for prose, and by extension women writers, the prestige historically afforded to verse" by borrowing poetry's tools and infusing them into prose (p. 28). Despite Woolf's distaste for verse, Kopley emphasizes that Woolf reveres many of its aspects, which she integrates into her prose to reinvent the novel. Though Woolf chides most poets' work as self-centered, Woolf also finds inspiration in this "lyric 'I'" for its dive into psychological experience. Woolf "explored in a novel a prose style" that draws upon the "lyric 'I'" to "convey the inner life" not of a single speaker but of multiple...