Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

124 WOOLFIAN BOUNDARIES
and Lewis’s Vorticist project Blast, Woolf subtly elides any mention of either Imagism or
Vorticism here, comparing the response to what is experimental in Eliot’s poetry to looking
at a Post-Impressionist painting. Eliot had no association with Post-Impressionism in
England, the Fry-orchestrated avant-garde circle with which Woolf has consistently been
linked. Perhaps the most signifi cant sign that she thought Eliot’s work important was her
active role with Pound and others beginning in 1922 to create a fellowship so that he
could quit his job at Lloyd’s of London and write full time. She cites Eliot as “one of the
Georgians” in her 1924 essay “Character in Fiction,” asserting that he had “written some
of the loveliest lines in modern poetry” (E3 434). And Eliot would remain for her through
the 1920s the epitome of the “true poet.”
Despite his importance during the teens and 20s in London literary circles, Pound
is left out of Woolf’s public accounts of modern literature and its aesthetic, perhaps most
notably in “Character in Fiction,” the essay that cogently articulates what is new about modernism,
the literary movement beginning famously “on or about December 1910” (E3 421).
Th e twelve years that had elapsed from that date included Pound’s call to “make it new” in
London’s literary circles. Privately, however, she was more forthcoming. In contrast to her
advocacy of Eliot’s poetry, about Pound’s poetry Woolf would say in a 1923 letter to Ottoline
Morrell that she had “never seen him; and only hate his works” (L3 71). In a contemporaneous
letter to Fry she compares the two American poets. First she acknowledges to Fry that
she had been in correspondence with Pound regarding the Eliot fund, which had resulted in
“a complete muddle, as you may imagine.” Eliot’s psychology about the eff orts on his behalf
fascinate her, however; he had been embarrassed about the venture to raise money for him,
a set of feelings that Woolf imagines as “Very American.” “Th e more I see of that race the
more I thank god for my British blood,” she says, “which does at any rate preserve one from
wearing 3 waistcoats; enamel buttons on one’s overcoat, and keeping one’s eyes perpetually
shut—like Ezra Pound” (L2 572). Th e inside joke between Woolf and Fry about American
clothing fashion notwithstanding, it is her assessment of Pound’s self imposed blindness that
indicates what she thinks of his poetics. Pound argues that Imagism and Vorticist poetics are
primarily visual, based on how a poet perceives the world through his or her eyes, and that
the poem presents that fi xed image to “record the precise instant when a thing outward and
objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective,” as he explains in his
“Vorticism” essay (Gaudier-Brzeska 103). In her letter to Fry then, Woolf expresses a pointed
critique of Pound by asserting that his eyes were “perpetually shut,” especially since, with
Jacob’s Room, her idea of a “new form for a new novel” (D2 13) privileges visuality as one of
its primary modes of apperception and expression.
Woolf returned to thinking and writing about poetry, poetics, and status in the late
1920s, especially when she was working out her argument regarding women and the
history of poetry for A Room of One’s Own. A pattern emerges in her diary from this
period when we trace her thinking about poetry and about her own status as a writer.
Th e reception of Orlando, “which surpassed expectations,” was accompanied by Rebecca
West’s praise of the book, calling it in her review “a poetic masterpiece of the fi rst rank.”
Woolf’s mixed response to the praise and the record sales of her book leave her feeling
“sheepish & silly” (D3 200), but also very aware of her “famous self tapering about the
world.” Simultaneously, while she’s thinking about her fame, she works on “Women and
Fiction” and writes, “as usual, I am bored by narrative.” So, fi nding narrative tedious, she