Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Hermione Lee's Woolf is a major Modernist who in conscious reaction against Victorian society and in artistic competition with other modern writers (Katherine Mansfield, Lytton Strachey, among others) set herself formal problems and solved them in her novels. Revealing is her process of writing. The intensity of writing a complete first draft gripped her but the coldness of revision was repugnant. She revised with great reluctance and labor, for re-reading what she wrote often shook her confidence in the writing. She was to the end of her life terrified of being laughed at. Despite her concern with form, when she tried to define to herself the essence of literature, she settled on "emotion." To argue for Woolf's significance, the biography also attends carefully to the political writing, primarily  A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas . In doing so, it shows convincingly how Woolf developed her feminism in response to her traditional upbringing, the women'...

It is a big book, 761 pages, and I am only at page 490 after working at it for two weeks. The mastery of detail is dazzling, the letters, the diaries, the writings, the biographies, the gossip, not just of Virginia, but also of her family and friends. Lee has a particular feeling for houses, just as Virginia had, and she describes them with much atmosphere. A tally of the houses: Talland House, the Stephens' beloved childhood summer house at St. Ives; 22 Hyde Park Gate, the family's Victorian home in London;  the convivial house shared by Thoby, Vanessa, Virginia and Adrian, after their parents' death, at Gordon Square in Bloomsbury; the unhappy house shared with Adrian at Fitzroy Square after Thoby's death and Vanessa's marriage to Clive Bell; No. 38 Brunswick Square, where Virginia rented rooms to Maynard Keynes and his lover Duncan Grant, and, later, Leonard Woolf; Asheham, where Virginia and Leonard spent the first night of their marriage; Monk's House in ...

Reading the TLS review of Robert Duncan's The H.D. Book , edited by Michael Broughn and Victor Coleman, I come across Duncan's explanation for his book: I am searching out, a poetics . . . my initiation of self as poet in the ground of the poet H.D. . . . how I had found my life in poetry through the agency of certain women". I am not yet a reader of Duncan, nor a serious reader of H.D., but Duncan's words here touch on my writing project, my next book Infinite Variety . I have been writing poems that take off from poems by women poets. Influenced by Michael Schmidt's description of a batch of these poems I submitted to PN Review, I have been thinking of the women's poems as points of departure . That description has been niggling my mind as not quite accurate, because I don't leave these poets behind me. They are with me. Duncan's words give me an alternative formulation. In my poems, I am thinking with these women poets. I think I will drop the r...