Do not cite or circulate outside the 2009 Berkeley-Stanford English Graduate Conference
The Lyrical Narrative v. the Narrative Lyric: Virginia Woolf and Wallace Stevens
Emily Kopley (2nd year at Stanford)
Note: This paper was written for Franco Moretti’s seminar in Spring 2008, Theory of the Novel.
I’d now like either to publish this paper as an article, or develop it as part of my dissertation. I
imagine my dissertation will be about either Woolf and the lyric or Woolf and American writers.
Introduction
Traditional understandings of literary genre associate poetry (or more precisely, lyric) as
with inner life and fiction (narrative) with outer life. By inner life is meant consciousness, the
measureless thoughts of an individual that roam among the present moment, memory, and
projects of the future. By outer life is meant the physical world, measured linearly, by arbitrary
scientific divisions, and common to all people and places. The two spheres are not separate but
interdependent. Inner life depends on outer: the mind does not reflect in a vacuum, but
apprehends and reflects upon external reality. And external events would have little meaning for
people if they did not affect inner life. Just as inner life and outer life are interdependent, so too
are lyric and narrative. Literary critics increasingly recognize that many texts defy exclusive
association with either lyric or narrative. In a recent article about the interaction between these
modes, Heather Dubrow lists a litany of assumptions about them: “Lyric is static and narrative
committed to change, lyric is internalized whereas narrative evokes an externally realized
situation, lyric attempts to impede the forward thrust of narrative, and so on.”1 Dubrow finds in
Renaissance lyrics subtle strains of narrative, demonstrating that the two modes have interacted
at least since then, and more so than has been supposed. Especially fertile cross-breeding of
Heather Dubrow, “The Interplay of Narrative and Lyric: Competition, Cooperation, and the
Case of the Anticipatory Amalgam,” Narrative 14:3 (October 2006): 1.
1
1
Do not cite or circulate outside the 2009 Berkeley-Stanford English Graduate Conference
narrative and lyric occurs in Modernist literature, as for instance in the literature of Virginia
Woolf (1884-1941) and Wallace Stevens (1879-1955).
Woolf, in fiction, and Stevens, in poetry, sought to capture what both called,
interchangeably, “reality” or “life.” Their shared vision of “reality” included both the external
and internal worlds, linear and mental time, fact and imagination. They are among the most
intense scrutinizers of the inner self, but they root this inner self in a relationship to the outer
world. “Realism is a corruption of reality,” quips Stevens in Adagia, his private collection of
aphorisms, and states also, “Life is not people and scene but thought and feeling.” Woolf writes
in “Letter to a Young Poet,” an essay Stevens may have read, “[the writer must] find the right
relationship . . . between the self you know and the world outside.”2 Significantly, each drew on
the others’ genre. Woolf, in her diary, noted proudly her husband’s praising of To the
Lighthouse as a “psychological poem,” and she described her novel The Waves as a “play-poem”
and “prose yet poetry.”3 Upon publication of The Waves, the critic William Troy wrote
litigiously that Woolf’s “form is unmistakably that of the extended or elaborated lyric; and
criticism of these novels gets down ultimately to the question with what impunity one can
confuse the traditional means of one literary form with the traditional means of another.”4 In the
Adagia is in the Library of America’s edition of Stevens’ collected work, 900-915. The first
quote is on 906, the second on 909. Virginia Woolf, “Letter to a Young Poet,” The Yale Review
21.4 (June 1932): 696-710. Reprinted in The Death of the Moth (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
Jovanovich, 1942) 221.
2
Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1982): 102, 107, 103,
respectively.
3
William Troy, “Virginia Woolf: The Novel of Sensibility,” in Virginia Woolf: A Collection of
Critical Essays, ed. Claire Sprague (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1971) 54. Troy’s
1937 article offers both a rich contemporary response to Woolf and a rigid narrative theory. His
understandings of Woolf and of narrative are now amusingly archaic. Consider this discussion:
“When narrative based itself on a simple chronological record of action, it was assured of a
4
2
Do not cite or circulate outside the 2009 Berkeley-Stanford English Graduate Conference
year after Woolf’s death in 1941, her friend E. M. Forster summarized what he considered “her
problem” : “She is a poet, who wants to write something as near to a novel as possible.”5
Evidently the blending of poetry and prose that Woolf considered her triumph some of her early
readers considered her “problem.” Woolf critics over the past seventy years have veered more
and more towards Woolf’s position, celebrating rather than denigrating her lyricism. The finest
study of Woolf’s lyricism is Ralph Freedman’s, in his 1963 The Lyrical Novel. He argues, “She
used the imposition of poetic techniques on the novel as a method to redefine rather than to
supplant traditional concepts of fiction.”6 My accord with him motivates another citation:
Her path toward lyricism had been marked not only by a genuine and faithful
concern with the inner life but also by her consciousness of the artist’s egocentric
predicament and her intense anxiety about the dangers of solipsism . . . . Her main
emphasis—despite many equivocal pronouncements to the contrary—was placed on the
need to combined both inner and outer experience in art. This combination extends from
private awareness to external ‘facts’ and ultimately to general ideas and values. In its
formal action, poetry begins with the self but leads to its depersonalization A similar
process takes place in lyrical prose narrative. Worlds in time and space are not precisely
reproduced but are rearranged in aesthetic designs which become universal and
symbolic.7
certain degree of interest. . . . For this reason. . . description has always occupied a most
uncertain place in fiction. Description, which deals with things rather than events, interposes a
space-world in the march of that time-world which is the subject of fiction. For this reason the
use of poetic symbols in fiction, as in all Mrs. Woolf’s work since Monday or Tuesday, seems to
be in direct contradiction to the foundations of our response to that form” (34-5).
E. M. Forster, “Virginia Woolf,” in Virginia Woolf: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Claire
Sprague (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1971) 20.
5
6
Ralph Freedman, The Lyrical Novel (Princeton, N.J: Princeton UP, 1963) 185.
7
Freedman 187-188.
3
Do not cite or circulate outside the 2009 Berkeley-Stanford English Graduate Conference
Woolf’s lyricism lies in both language and in scene, which often complement each other.8
In her greatest novels, among which I count To the Lighthouse, The Waves, and Between the
Acts, Woolf uses a rhapsodic rhythm and symbolic vocabulary to explore characters’ minds at a
single moment (a recurring word of Woolf’s). By dwelling on moments, occasioned by major
plot events that play a crucial but pianissimo second fiddle, Woolf’s narratives complicate the
novel genre’s supposed passion for progression. Freedman points out that at these moments
Woolf blends poetry into narrative, avoiding the extremes of solipsism or photographic realism
and instead conjoining the self and the outer world. Between these moments of stasis in which
Woolf’s characters reveal themselves, the characters experience change, in themselves and the
outside world. For this reason Woolf’s books remains novels. In To the Lighthouse, Mrs Ramsay
dies, prompting a major psychological shift in those who loved her. Mrs Ramsay’s death is
mentioned in brackets, but her survivors’ thoughts absorb chapters.9 Plot events have lost
frequency and page-time, but remain integral to characters’ sensibilities.
Just as Woolf’s narratives embrace poetry, Stevens’ poems often imply a narrative. His
titles sometimes sound as though they belong in a short-story anthology or narrative theory
textbook: consider “The Plot Against the Giant,” “Anecdote of Men by the Thousand,”
“Anecdote of the Prince of the Peacocks,” “Anecdote of the Jar,” “Re-statement of Romance,”
“Two Tales of Liadoff,” “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” “Page from a Tale,” and “The
Novel.” Frequently his poems are in the form of a dialogue, which imply characters and
In “Phases of Fiction,” Woolf herself distinguishes between two kinds of poetry in novels,
poetry of language and poetry of scene. This essay is in Granite and Rainbow.
9
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 1927 (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, Inc., 2001?) 128 :“[Mr.
Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay
having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.]”
Future citations to the novel will be parenthetical.
8
4
Do not cite or circulate outside the 2009 Berkeley-Stanford English Graduate Conference
development. And the middle dictum of Steven’s famous instruction for modern poetry in “Notes
toward a Supreme Fiction”-- “It must be abstract. It must change. It must give pleasure” (italics
mine)—contradicts the association of lyric with stasis. Stevens’ use of narrative vocabulary and
conventions in his poetry has been addressed thoughtfully by critics. For example, Daniel
Schwartz, in his Narrative and Representation in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, demonstrates
with Bakhtinian analysis that Stevens’ poetic dialogues involve drama and narrative, and also
finds that Stevens’ poems mirror the poet’s own life and thus trace the story of an aging self.
And Angus Cleghorn and Bonnie Costello argue that Stevens draws on epic narrative teleology
(as for instance “The Sail of Ulysses” and “Prologues to What is Possible”) to highlight its
lacunae. Cleghorn follows Schwartz in studying Stevens’ poetic dialogues (e.g. “The Motive for
Metaphor” and “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”), showing how Stevens engages the reader to
produce a story behind the lyric. As Freedman argues that Woolf is above all a novelist,
discussion of Stevens as narrative poet never question that Stevens is above all a poet. But what
assures that Woolf is a novelist and Stevens a poet? What are the limits of incorporating one
genre into another? Comparing Woolf and Stevens may help satisfy this question.
We see that Woolf and Stevens share a view of reality as the interaction of inner and
outer time and reflect this view by drawing on the others’ genre. More specific affinities abound,
yet literary critics have dwelt little on the relation between these writers. A few have nodded
here and there. For instance, William Burney has written on Stevens, “Perhaps the writer most
akin to him, in this century, is Virginia Woolf; The Waves, especially, contains many passages
that sound word for word like Stevens.”10 Indeed, not only in The Waves but in much of Woolf’s
work run words common to Stevens’, including “self,” “truth,” “beauty,” “reality,” “life,”
10
William Burney, Wallace Stevens (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1968) 177.
5
Do not cite or circulate outside the 2009 Berkeley-Stanford English Graduate Conference
“moment,” “knowledge,” “imagination,” “God,” “sun,” “sea,” “chaos,” “obscure,” “order,”
“mirror,” “dome,” “center,” and “the thing itself.” These words alone convey shared
philosophical and aesthetic concerns. In counterpoint to Burney’s comment on Stevens,
Hermione Lee has observed that Woolf’s novels “express a secular faith in the value of the seen
and felt—a faith more usually expressed in the twentieth century in poetry.” She then offers
Stevens’ “Sunday Morning” as an example of such poetry, explaining that it evinces “the belief,
shared by Virginia Woolf, in the objects of the mortal world as the most significant metaphors
of, and vehicles for, our spiritual life.” 11 Lee also notes that a passage in The Waves “oddly
echoes Wallace Stevens’ ‘Disillusionment at Ten O’Clock.’”12 Likewise assenting to the WoolfStevens connection is Stevens’ biographer, Joan Richardson, who writes in the biography that
the “overlays of . . . Stevens/Woolf [are] too numerous to be developed here.” 13 The only book
to devote more than a sentence to the connection between the writers, to my knowledge, is
Daniel J. Schneider’s Symbolism: The Manichean Vision.14 Schneider argues that Henry James,
Joseph Conrad, Woolf, and Stevens reject the extreme attitudes of idealism and materialism in
favor of a realism that sees the world in all its ambiguities. (“Realism” here means not the
photographical realism of a 19th century novel, but a head-on, open attitude towards the world.)
This realist view perceives that the world contains both comedy and tragedy, free will and fate,
stability and change, order and chaos, etc., and thus that the artist can achieve a temporary,
11
Hermione Lee, The Novels of Virginia Woolf (London: Methuen & Co., 1977) 29.
12
Lee 164.
13
Joan Richardson, Wallace Stevens: the Later Years (vol. 2) (New York: Beech Tree Books,
1988) 434.
Forthcoming in July is Edna Rosenthal’s Aristotle and Modernism: Aesthetic Affinities of T. S.
Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Virginia Woolf, which promises to show that Stevens and Woolf
embraced Aristotelian aesthetics more than has been supposed.14
14
6
Do not cite or circulate outside the 2009 Berkeley-Stanford English Graduate Conference
unsure redemption from the chaos. Schneider closely aligns Woolf and Stevens’ positions:
“[Woolf’s] vision of imperishable-perishable essences in the destructive winds and fires of the
flux is essentially one with that of Wallace Steven. Like Stevens, she knows that the lovely
integrations, the beautiful circles that represent wholeness, the supreme fictions, are shattered by
the flux.”15 Schneider’s reading of the writers’ philosophy seems to me robust. His observations
leave much room for and indeed invite detailed comparison of Woolf’s and Stevens’ work. I aim
in this paper to compare Woolf passages to Stevens poems so as to elucidate the similarities
others have sketched and to suggest further ones. In the process, I will consider what makes
Woolf’s lyrical narratives fundamentally narratives, and Stevens’ narrative poems fundamentally
poems.
Did Woolf and Stevens read each other’s work? Certainly Stevens read Woolf, but
evidence is circumstantial that Woolf read Stevens. Woolf never traveled to Stevens’ America,
and Stevens never traveled to Woolf’s England. The two never met or corresponded, and neither
mentions the other in letters or diaries. Stevens’ only published mention of Woolf is his citation
of her views about income tax in his 1942 essay “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words.” In
other work he alludes to Woolf’s close friends Roger Fry and Lytton Strachey. 16 Bloomsbury’s
repute reached Hartford’s hearing, but Hartford’s may not have reached Bloomsbury’s: Woolf
never mentioned Stevens in writing. Possibly her friend T. S. Eliot introduced her to the work of
15
Daniel J. Schneider, Symbolism: The Manichean Vision -- A Study in the Art of James,
Conrad, Woolf & Stevens (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1975) 36.
Stevens quotes Fry at the opening of his 1951 lecture, “The Relations between Poetry and
Painting.” This and “The Noble Rider” are collected in The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality
and the Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1951). Stevens’ 1935 poem “Lytton Strachey,
Also, Enters Heaven,” was published for the first time in the recent Library of America Stevens
edition, p. 56.
16
7
Do not cite or circulate outside the 2009 Berkeley-Stanford English Graduate Conference
his fellow American poet. But less speculative connections lie in the writers’ libraries. The
extant, major portion of Woolf’s library is at the University of Washington, and their checklist
does not include any Stevens titles.17 However, both Woolf and Stevens read The Yale Review, in
which Woolf occasionally published and in which Stevens’ Harmonium (1923) and Ideas of
Order (1936) were reviewed.18 And Stevens also subscribed to The Hogarth Press, run by
Virginia and her husband Leonard.19 His extant book collection, most of which is at The
Huntington Library, contains every book of fiction by Virginia Woolf since her 1921 short-story
collection Monday or Tuesday. Stevens may have been familiar with Woolf as early as June
1920, when, in another publication he owned, The London Mercury, Woolf’s essay “An
Unwritten Novel” was published.20 Certainly Stevens’ interest in Woolf was enduring: his book
collection includes Woolf’s posthumous A Writer’s Diary and two posthumous short-story
collections. The pages of Stevens’ Jacob’s Room remain uncut, but the ten other books have cut
17
Julia King and Laila Miletic-Vejzovik, eds., The Library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf
(Pullman, Washington: Washington State University Press, 2003).
In The Yale Review, Louis Untermeyer’s review of Harmonium appeared in v. 14 (Oct 1924):
159-60; F. O. Matthiessen’s review of Ideas of Order v. 25 (Spring 1936): 605-7. Both are
reprinted in Critical Essays on Wallace Stevens, ed. Stephen Gould Axelrod and Helen Deese
(Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1988). Woolf reviewed Augustine Birrell for the periodical in June
1930, and William Hazlitt in September 1930. As well, she contributed “How Should One Read
a Book?” in October 1926, “A Street Haunting” in October 1927, “Memories of a Working
Women’s Guild” in September 1930, “Letters to a Young Poet” in June 1932, a review of a book
about Turgenev in December 1933, a review of Oliver Goldsmith in March 1934, and “A
Conversation About Art” (later republished as “Walter Sickert: A Conversation”) in September
1934. For this information I am indebted to B. J. Kirkpatrick’s bibliography. And see Robin
Majumdar and and Allen McLaurin’s Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage for the note that
Woolf’s novel Orlando was reviewed in The Yale Review 18 (1939).
18
19
Richardson, vol. 2, 52.
20
Robin Majumdar and Allen McLaurin, eds., Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage (London:
Routledge, 1997) 87.
8
Do not cite or circulate outside the 2009 Berkeley-Stanford English Graduate Conference
pages. They are unmarked, but Stevens rarely marked his books. Significantly, he did mark up
his copy of Woolf’s essay “The Leaning Tower,” published in Folios of New Writing: Autumn
1940 and concerning the declining rigor in the education of poets after World War I.21 That
Woolf’s political views punctured Stevens’ consciousness is clear; that her fiction did the same
might be born out in this paper. The question of influence, however, cannot finally be answered.
The affinities between Woolf’s and Stevens’ writing attest more assuredly to shared
temperaments and cultural context than to direct influence. On the question of influence, let the
reader judge.
Now it remains to explore these affinities. I have chosen to study here two poems by
Stevens that read like condensations of passages in Woolf novels. Stevens’ “Final Soliloquy of
the Interior Paramour” and “Prologues to What is Possible,” both in his 1954 The Rock, sound
much like parts of To the Lighthouse, published in 1927. The Stevens poems are appended to this
paper if not quoted in the text; I quote Woolf as needed.
Mrs Ramsay and the Interior Paramour
“Light the first light of evening,” instructs Stevens’ “Interior Paramour,” the poet’s
creative mind, to his lover and cohabitant, the creative muse.22 “Light the candles,” Mrs Ramsay
tells her children, inaugurating the dinner party in To the Lighthouse (96), which is narrated
mostly by her internal soliloquy. As the Paramour and Mrs Ramsay are akin, so is the
Paramour’s “intensest rendezvous” akin to the dinner party that is, eventually, Mrs Ramsay’s
Richardson, vol. 2, 170 and 434. Folios is part of the small Stevens’ library owned by the
University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
21
22
The poem has been read variously, but it seems safe and logical here to conflate poet and
speaker. My reading is shared by Daniel Andersson in his The Nothing That Is: The Structure of
Consciousness in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens (Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala Universitet, 2006).
9
Do not cite or circulate outside the 2009 Berkeley-Stanford English Graduate Conference
“triumph” (100). This dinner party is the novel’s affirmative peak; Mrs Ramsay’s
aforementioned death at the novel’s center gains in pathos by following closely on this scene.
The Paramour’s invocation seeks help to create a poem; Mrs Ramsay seeks help to create a
dinner party scene as moving and unchanging as a work of art. The dinner party is a prime
example of Woolf’s method of using an extended moment to unite inner and outer life, and thus
of achieving poetry within a narrative frame. Stevens’ “Final Soliloquy” exemplifies this same
unification it conveys a narrative, but, as the title specifies, it is monologic and static in that it is
“final” : after the communion there is no further soliloquy. The poem imagines either eternal
mental communion between poet and muse, and thus a world of nothing but poetry, or else a
communion that will end and never recur, and thus a world of no more poetry. Either way, the
poem does not participate in a sequence. Woolf’s moments always do. In both cases the moment
involves unity, traditionally associated with lyric. By virtue of their monologism, stasis, and
sense of unity, both the dinner party scene of To the Lighthouse and “Final Soliloquy” exemplify
lyric. But the differing approach within the shared form reflects differences between their genres.
From their first lines on, the passage and the poem describe similar moments of
coherence and clarity with similar language. Stevens’ paramour imagines “a room / In which we
rest” ; Woolf’s characters “assemble in the dining-room for dinner” (82) and the dinner
concludes when Mrs Ramsay “left the room” (111). The Woolf passage is framed textually as the
dinner is framed spatially, by “the room.” At the dinner’s zenith of coherence, Mrs Ramsay, like
the paramour, has a feeling of “rest” (105). In both cases the feeling coincides with one of
harmony. Stevens’ paramour says to his muse, “we collect ourselves, / Out of all the
indifferences, into one thing,” while Mrs Ramsay rescues her guests from their thinking that she
is “remote” (84), that they are “isolated and lonely” (85), that friends “soon drift apart” (88), and
10
Do not cite or circulate outside the 2009 Berkeley-Stanford English Graduate Conference
that life is “scraps and fragments” (90).23 She does this by directing her children to light the
candles, which soon yields that, “the faces on both sides of the table were brought nearer by the
candlelight, composed.” In the Stevens poem, “a single shawl / Wrapped tightly round” provides
a “warmth, / A light, a power, the miraculous influence.” In Woolf, just before Mrs Ramsay tells
the children to light the candles, we read: “Pulling her shawl round her Mrs Ramsay felt that
something was lacking” (94). What is lacking is internal communion; each character thinks,
“Pray heaven that the inside of my mind may not be exposed” (94). The disunity becomes unity
amidst the shared viewing of the candles and their light. As in Stevens, a shawl, Mrs Ramsay’s
metonym, provides “warm[th]” (101), “light” (97), and a “miracle” (98). [Elsewhere in the novel
is mentioned Mrs Ramsay’s “power” (176, 181)] The parallels continue. The Paramour needs
the shawl because, he says, “we are poor” ; Lily Briscoe, an unmarried guest, feels a “poverty of
spirit.” Wrapped in the shawl, the Paramour and his addressee feel “the obscurity of an order, a
whole, / A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.” Similarly, wrapped in her shawl,
Mrs Ramsay feels that “here, inside the room, seemed to be order” (97), thinks that “the whole is
held together” (107), and plans to “arrange” that Lily and the bachelor Mr. Bankes “take a long
walk together” (104), a future rendezvous. The Paramour recognizes that his rendezvous exists
“in the mind . . . the central mind,” celebrating the divine power of the individual imagination.
Mrs Ramsay’s mind is of course the “central” one of the dinner party scene, and it is because
“she had it on her mind that Lily . . was out of things” that “she drew her in” (103-4). Further, as
the Paramour articulates, “We say God and the imagination are one,” so does Mrs Ramsay
suppose that the dinner occurs “in a cathedral” (110). And throughout the book Mrs Ramsay is
The word “indifference,” though not in this Lighthouse passage, teems in The Waves, as for
instance on 104, 105, 119, and 175 of my recent Harcourt edition.
23
11
Do not cite or circulate outside the 2009 Berkeley-Stanford English Graduate Conference
associated with worship: earlier in the book, Lily observes Mrs Ramsay and wonders, “Into what
sanctuary had one penetrated?” (50), and when she later imagines Mrs Ramsay’s spirit near her,
she feels in a “cathedral-like place.” (She feels too, in perverse resonance with “obscurity of an
order,” “the extreme obscurity of human relationships” (171).] Towards the end of the Stevens
poem, the Paramour observes, “how high the highest candle lights the dark,” which echoes Mrs
Ramsay’s observation, towards the end of dinner, that “the candle flames burnt brighter now that
the panes were black.” More: soon after observing “the highest candle,” the Paramour concludes
that “being there together is enough” ; near the end of dinner, Mrs. Ramsay delights in a “joy. . .
like a smoke, like a fume rising upwards, holding them safe together.”24 When the central mind
of Mrs Ramsay rises to leave the room, it regards what it has created as though it were a painting
about to fade or a play about to end: “she waited a moment longer in a scene which was
vanishing as she looked” (111). And when she definitively departs, the artwork collapses:
“Directly she went a sort of disintegration set in; they wavered about, went different ways”
(112). The same might happen to the paramour and his muse, who, after having achieved
“enough,” might separate forever, as I have said, given that the soliloquy is “final.”
Though both the poem and the Woolf passage are soliloquys, the action and time of the
former is exclusively mental, while the latter merges mental action and time with physical.
Stevens’ poem dwells exclusively in inner life because it is about itself, while Mrs Ramsay’s
A conspicuous use by Mrs Ramsay of the word “enough” occurs earlier, when she feels a
similar joy upon regarding the lighthouse, who is “so much her, yet so little her”: “the ecstasy
burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is
enough! It is enough!” (65) Also, the Paramour’s line, “We make a dwelling in the evening air,”
bears a strong relation to the repeated line in Woolf’s The Waves, “We [or “they] make [or
“made”] a perfect dwelling place” (e.g. 163, 164, 228). This line is always accompanied by “the
structure is now visible,” which resonates with the line from Stevens’ “The Plain Sense of
Things,” also in The Rock, “The great structure has become a minor house.”
24
12
Do not cite or circulate outside the 2009 Berkeley-Stanford English Graduate Conference
thoughts blends inner and outer life because her creation exists in time and in the communal
world. She recognizes the inner/outer division at the scene’s outset: “But what have I done with
my life?” she wonders as she “rais[es] her eyebrows at the discrepancy—that was what she was
thinking, this was what she was doing—ladling out soup” (82-3). What she has done, of course,
and continues to do, is unite people in moments of joy and stability precisely by embracing the
“discrepancy.” She blends outer and inner life, action and thought: her power lies equally in her
physical beauty and gestures and in her commanding silence.25 Similarly, the power of Woolf’s
art lies in her setting her characters in the physical world and using commanding language to
articulate what is unsaid.
Studying the works’ shared concern with communion and romance confirms their generic
differences. Both “Final Soliloquy” and the dinner party of To the Lighthouse argue that
communion yields artistic creation, and both endow the human creator with divinity. In both
cases the communion is figured romantically. The “interior paramour” calls to his muse (who is
probably female, if she follows her literary ancestors) to join in “the intensest rendezvous,”
which sounds like a highly romantic dinner for two. The result of their communion is
(pro)creation. Likewise, Mrs Ramsay brings people together at her party with an eye towards
matchmaking. In the middle of dinner a newly engaged couple (originally set up by Mrs
Ramsay) arrives, and, seeing them, Lily feels that Mrs Ramsay “exalted [love], worshipped that;
Woolf copiously mentions Mrs Ramsay’s beauty, as for instance on 82, just before the dinner
scene. For Mrs Ramsay’s thoughts about silence, see 114, on which she reminds herself that “she
must not speak aloud.” And consider, on 124, her tacit communication of love to her husband:
“She had triumphed again. She had not said it: yet he knew.” Finally, at the peak of the dinner
party, she thinks, “Nothing need be said; nothing could be said There it was, all round them. It
partook. . . of eternity . . . there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is
immune from change, and shines out” (105). Extended comparison of silence in To the
Lighthouse and “Final Soliloquoy” would be fruitful.
25
13
Do not cite or circulate outside the 2009 Berkeley-Stanford English Graduate Conference
held her hands over it to warm them, to protect it” (101). Soon after, Mrs Ramsay thinks,
“William must marry Lily,” and it is this thought that spurs her sense of “eternity. . . coherence. .
. stability. . . rest. . . the thing [that] endures.” The poet’s mind creates romantic union within
itself; Mrs Ramsay creates romantic union between people. The poet’s thought of his internal
union prompts the poem itself; Mrs. Ramsay’s thought about romantic union prompts a
sustaining “scene,” a moment of art-like life.26
It would be unfair to deduce from this difference that Stevens’ poems always concern the
interior self, for his poems are often dialogues and often more rooted in physical reality than is
“Final Soliloquy.” It is true that Woolf’s fiction always concerns interpersonal relationships. And
what is fair to conclude, I think, is that the Paramour’s concern with his poem and Mrs Ramsay’s
concern with others reflects Stevens’ paramount concern with epistemology, versus Woolf’s
paramount concern with emotion. In “Final Soliloquy,” the poet feels a “knowledge” while Mrs
Ramsay a “community of feeling” (113). In “Phases of Fiction,” Woolf writes that “the most
characteristic qualities of a novel” are “that it registers the slow growth and development of
feeling.”27 Poetry, by contrast, must create “synthesis,” “select,” “symbolize, “give us an epitome
as well as an inventory.”28 These characteristics sound much more scientific than “feeling.” They
also apply to Woolf’s technique of moments. In the dinner party scene she “registers . . . feeling”
by means of “synthesis,” creates “an epitome as well as an inventory.” But note that she still
holds “development of feeling” as “the most characteristic qualities of a novel” : poetry—and
After Mrs Ramsay’s death, Lily recalls her power to bring “together this and that and . . .
[make] something. . . which survived . . . affecting one almost like a work of art” (160).
26
27
Woolf, Granite and Rainbow 143.
28
Ibid. 145.
14
Do not cite or circulate outside the 2009 Berkeley-Stanford English Graduate Conference
thus epistemology—is secondary. In fact, To the Lighthouse stresses the impossibility and
undesirability of knowledge: “it was not knowledge but unity that she desired” (51), we read of
Lily, and later she wonders, “Who knows what we are, what we feel? Who knows even at the
moment of intimacy, this is knowledge?” (171).
When there is emotion in Stevens, it informs questions and perceptions, rather than vice
versa. Consider, for instance, what Stevens writes of the protagonist of “Sunday Morning”:
“Divinity must live within herself: / Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow; / Grievings in
loneliness, or unsubdued / Elations when the forest blooms; / Emotions on wet roads on autumn
nights; All pleasures and all pains, remembering / The bough of summer and the winter branch. /
These are the measure destined for her soul.”29 The poet tells us facts: “divinity must,” “these
are.” By contrast, Woolf conveys that divinity lives within Mrs Ramsay by telling us not facts
but feelings—that is, by exploring her passions and moods, her pleasures and pains.
Significantly, the woman of “Sunday Morning” experiences emotions due to the weather and the
seasons; Mrs Ramsay due to her family and friends. The external world, in Stevens, tends to lie
in objects and natural phenomena; in Woolf, in other selves. Stevens creates minds, Woolf
creates characters. Even in The Waves, Woolf’s most lyrical and mental novel, characters affect
each other. Six soliloquizing voices reflect on the course of the six characters’ lives—for lives
they have, in which they experience childhood, romantic liaisons, marriages, careers, and deaths.
Yet, Stevens too questions knowledge. Both “Final Soliloquy” and To the Lighthouse, are
troubled by doubt, doubt which refines what we have so far established. The Paramour’s
“knowledge” may be chimerical, for his solace in the imagination is slippery: “we . . . for small
reason, think / The world imagined is the ultimate good” (italics mine); “We say God and the
29
Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems (New York: Vintage Books, 1982) 67.
15
Do not cite or circulate outside the 2009 Berkeley-Stanford English Graduate Conference
imagination are one…” (italics mine, ellipses not). More than professing certain faith in the
imagination, the poet expresses his desire for such faith. So too does Mrs Ramsay. When she
feels “order,” it is only apparent: “here, inside the room, seemed to be order” (97). Similarly, the
fruit bowl “seemed possessed of great size and depth” (97) and “Everything seemed possible.
Everything seemed right” (104). Given that so much only seems, Mrs Ramsay’s “community of
feeling” may also be illusory. The fact that Mrs Ramsay’s thoughts narrate most of the scene
calls all she perceives into question. We do not know if Lily and Mr Bankes feel the profound
stasis that their matchmaker does upon thinking of them. In fact, Mrs Ramsay’s bias is ratted out
by Lily, who thinks about romantic love and feels “a curious sense rising in her, at once freakish
and tender. . . for what could be more serious than the love of man for woman . . . at the same
time these lovers, these people entering into illusion, glittering eyed, must be danced round with
mockery” (100). “Illusion,” throughout Woolf, characterizes art as well as romantic love:
precisely that which Woolf celebrates as giving meaning to life. Stevens too adores and frets
over the word “illusion,” writing paradoxically in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” of
“Disillusion as the last illusion, / Reality as a thing seen by the mind” (l. 74). Woolf and Stevens
share a secular faith in artistic creation and in human love, but their faith wavers. They worship
illusion uneasily, regarding it alternately as the truest reality and as empty sheen. They recognize
truth as vague and various, and this recognition spurs their tireless efforts to connect the self to
the world. “We collect ourselves . . . into one thing,” says the Paramour, but “nothing is simply
one thing,” says Mrs Ramsay’s son James. James and the Paramour might have uttered the
other’s lines, for their creators both see life in a flux that includes unity and disunity.
“Final Soliloquy” and the dinner party scene demonstrate what is quintessentially lyrical
in their authors’ oeuvres. Both passages use an interior monologue to narrate a moment of stasis
16
Do not cite or circulate outside the 2009 Berkeley-Stanford English Graduate Conference
that involves unity. Within this mutual lyricism, Woolf’s fiction retains what is “most
characteristic” of the novel: she blends the inner world with the outer, thereby conveying the
emotion of a character. Stevens’ Paramour remains interior, and conveys the knowledge of a
mind.
Mr Ramsay, Lily, and the Man in the Boat
The writers’ shared wariness of “illusion” emerges again upon comparing Stevens’
“Prologues to What is Possible” to the third and final section of Woolf’s novel, “The
Lighthouse.” If “Final Soliloquy” and the dinner party scene exemplify lyric in their authors’
oeuvres, “Prologues” and “The Lighthouse” exemplify narrative. Again the works describe
similar situations with similar language.30 In the Stevens poem, a man imagines himself
confidently riding in a boat towards a symbolical destination; in “The Lighthouse,” Mr Ramsay
directs the boat trip to the lighthouse that is the book’s great symbol. At the same time as Mr
Ramsay’s trip, Lily completes the painting that has occupied her since before Mrs Ramsay’s
death, and this completion echoes Mr Ramsay’s arrival at the lighthouse. The first part of
“Prologues” narrates the metaphorical boat journey; the second comments on the metaphor. The
poem begins, “There was an ease of mind that was like being alone at sea” and in a similar early
line, “he traveled alone, like a man lured on by a syllable without / any meaning” (italics mine).
In To the Lighthouse, the journey is real, and only secondarily metaphorical. The metaphorical
aspect of the journey gains strength from Lily’s contemporaneous completion of her painting.
Beverly Maeder points out that much of “Prologues” draws on similar lines in earlier Stevens
poems, but this does not weaken my argument. Stevens and Woolf, like most writers, use
favorite language recurrently, but the combination and context in a particular passage renews the
words. For Maeder’s comment, see Wallace Stevens’ Experimental Language: The Lion and the
Lute (New York City: St. Martin’s Press, 1999) 94.
30
17
Do not cite or circulate outside the 2009 Berkeley-Stanford English Graduate Conference
The linguistic parallels between the first part of the poem and the novel tend to concern Mr
Ramsay, while the parallels between the second part of the poem and the novel tend to concern
Lily.
Just as the poem’s metaphorical journey is compared to an “ease of mind,” the Ramsay
family, truly at sea, momentarily feels “at their ease” (187). Both journeys include oarsmen.
Stevens’ man, though at first “he traveled alone,” imagines waves that resemble oarsmen, and
then imagines riding with the real thing. So does Mr Ramsay ride with “Macalister’s boy, who
got out his oars and began to row” (162). Stevens’ wave-like oarsmen submit and assert
themselves in a cycle, each time “bending over and pulling themselves erect.” The oarsman
Macalister joins them in submission in that he suffers Mr Ramsay’s “sharp” words (162). So too
do Cam and James, the children who reluctantly submit to join their father on the journey, keep
their “heads. . . bent down” (163). Mr Ramsay joins the oarsmen in their assertive motion
(“pulling themselves erect”): “he pulled himself up, and waved his hand towards the shore”
(165). While the man in the poem is “lured on by a syllable without any meaning,” Mr Ramsay
repeats aloud, to his children’s irritation, a line from Cowper’s “The Castaway,” “We perished,
each alone.” Sometimes he repeats only “perished” or “alone,” as right before the voyage, when
Lily hears him: “(‘Alone’ she heard him say, ‘Perished’ she heard him say) and like everything
else this strange morning the words became symbols” (147). His repetition inclines the phrase to
lack meaning, like Stevens’ man’s “syllable.” And the word “alone” resonates with the poem’s
twice-told “alone.” Furthermore, as in the poem the boat is “built of stones that had lost their
weight and be- / come no longer heavy,” so too in “The Lighthouse” does Lily feel, just before
Mr Ramsay’s departure, that “she could not sustain this enormous weight of sorrow, support
these heavy draperies of grief . . . a moment longer” (151). She feels this “weight” and “heavy. . .
18
Do not cite or circulate outside the 2009 Berkeley-Stanford English Graduate Conference
grief” because of Mr Ramsay’s presence; when he leaves this weight is lost and she feels no
longer heavy.31 As the man in the poem “stood up in the boat” with “sureness,” so do we read of
Mr Ramsay, “he rose and stood in the bow of the boat, very straight and tall” and conveying firm
atheism (207). And as in the poem the man “belonged to the far-foreign departure of his vessel
and was / part of it,” so it is said that Mr Ramsay “escaped . . . somewhere far away” (203-4) and
that he and his children “had become part of the nature of things” (188). The boat in the poem
has “glass-like sides” ; that sail “over the salt-stained water”; the waves in the novel break “like
smashed glass” (203), and “the fishing lines slanted taut across the side of the boat” as it sails on
a “sea without a stain on it” (188). The poem’s “point of central arrival” parallels the novel’s
lighthouse, of course, at which Mr Ramsay arrives at the same time that Lily draws a “line . . . in
the centre” of her painting (209).32 The “instant moment” of the poem finds twins in the
abundant “moment”s of the novel, as for example when James, on the boat, can think freely of
his mother because “for the moment [Mr Ramsay] was reading” (187), and when Lily thinks
about “Mrs Ramsay making of the moment something permanent (as in another sphere Lily
herself tried to make of the moment something permanent)—this was of the nature of a
revelation” (161). And in a final connection between the first half of the poem and “The
Lighthouse,” just as the man in the poem is “removed from any shore, from any man or woman,
and need- / ing none,” so does Mr Ramsay, as he prepares to set sail, “no longer need” Lily’s
sympathy (154).
In Lily’s vision of Mrs Ramsay’s ghost, Mrs Ramsay too is “relieved for a moment of the
weight that the world had put on her” (181). Lily and Mrs Ramsay are alike in that both create
something enduring (161), and this shared description reinforces their tie.
31
The coincidence between Mr Ramsay’s arrival at the lighthouse and Lily’s completion of her
painting is precise: “He has landed,” Lily says, and adds, referring at once to his journey and her
painting, “It is finished” (208).
32
19
Do not cite or circulate outside the 2009 Berkeley-Stanford English Graduate Conference
As I have said, the man in the poem finds a double not only in Mr Ramsay but also in
Lily. Like the “alone” man with an “ease of mind,” Lily, on the lawn, increasingly absorbed in
her painting, feels “perfectly alone, over the sea” (172) and “at one’s ease” (192). The affinities
accrue especially in the poem’s second half. Here, the man in the poem “fear[s]” the distance
between himself and the symbol with which he has associated himself, but he meditates that
perhaps the distance might be breached by “hypotheses / On which men speculated in summer
when they were half asleep.” Similarly, Lily on the lawn feels a sense of the world’s renewal, “as
a traveler, even though he is half-asleep, knows, looking out of the train window, that he must
look now, for he will never see that town. . . again” (194, italics mine). In the poem, the man
finds consolation in a sense of the limitlessness of his identity: “what self, for example, did he
contain that had not yet been loosed?” Lily finds consolation in the same, as she looks at her
lawn companion, Mr Carmichael, an aging poet, “thinking how many shapes one person might
wear” (194). The man in the poem imagines that he will give the to-be-discovered aspect of
himself “a name and privilege over the ordinary of his commonplace,” and yet from this
“ordinar[iness]” come “unexpected magnitudes.” In the same vein, Lily wants “to be on a level
with ordinary experience, to feel simply that’s a chair, that’s a table, and yet at the same time,
It’s a miracle, it’s an ecstasy” (202).33 Earlier, Lily’s mind has wandered to Mrs Ramsay’s
“mania for marriage,” and she feels triumphant for having not married and yet remained happy.
In concert with the “Prologues” lines, “the earliest single light in the evening sky, in spring, /
Creates a fresh universe out of nothingness,” and “speculum of fire on [the boat’s] prow,” we
In “Prologues,” the line following “the ordinary of his commonplace,” “A flick which added to
what was real and its vocabulary,” echoes lines of the novel that return us to the Ramsay family
on the boat: Mr Ramsay is “powerless to flick off these grains of misery” (187) in the same
context in which his daughter thinks “this was real: the boat and the sail with its patch” (167).
33
20
Do not cite or circulate outside the 2009 Berkeley-Stanford English Graduate Conference
read, “as suddenly as a star slides into the sky, a reddish light seemed to burn in her mind” (175).
Thinking of people in love, she feels “fear” (175)—as the man in poem has felt “fear” when
thinking of the metaphor. But after she determines how to harmonize her painting, we read that,
like the man in the poem, who “needs” no one, and like Mr Ramsay, who once on his journey
longer needs Lily’s sympathy, Lily “did not want Mrs Ramsay, now” (195). In all cases a
character loses dependence on others as they realize their aim and themselves. In the final stanza
of “Prologues,” the man realizes that his small contribution to the world may alter it enormously.
So too at the end of To the Lighthouse does Lily realize the same about her painting. “It would be
hung in the attics . . . it would be destroyed,” she imagines, then thinks, “But what did that
matter?” (208) and victoriously draws the line down the middle.
Like dutiful narratives, both “Prologues” and “The Lighthouse” progress towards goals.
The first half of the poem follows the man’s metaphorical sea-voyage, and the second half his
meditation, which begins in “fear” of the metaphor and resolves in delight at the sense of
possibility the metaphor suggests. The novel is propelled as well by a sea-voyage and a
metaphorical journey: the trip to the lighthouse and Lily’s painting. Loosely speaking, the
journey to the lighthouse occurs in the physical world, and Lily’s painting in the metaphorical or
symbolic world—but really the two overlap, since the lighthouse unites both aims, and is itself at
once physical and symbolic. The lighthouse is the characters’ and the novel’s telos, as it is the
universal telos of sailors’ at sea. In the novel it is at once a physical structure that one can see
and visit, and a rich symbol of many meanings. Associated with Mrs Ramsay, it is the
appropriate physical destination for the widowed Mr Ramsay and metaphorical destination of the
bereaved Lily (whose “line. . . in the centre,” we recall, symbolizes the lighthouse, as I have
said). The progression to the lighthouse and to Lily’s finished painting illustrates Woolf’s sense
21
Do not cite or circulate outside the 2009 Berkeley-Stanford English Graduate Conference
of novelistic development. This development is rooted in the physical world—the world of the
realist novel, we might say—and in the metaphorical world—the world of poetry. So too is
“Prologues” rooted in both worlds, presenting a physical journey (as found in narrative) as a
metaphor (as found in lyric).
The difference between the two works’ concern with the physical and the metaphorical is
that the former is the backbone of Woolf, the latter the backbone of Stevens’ poetry. To the
Lighthouse regards its central symbol first as a physical object to which one takes a physical
journey. The physical object accrues symbolic value through the course of the novel (with Mrs
Ramsay, with Lily’s painting), but always the physical precedes the metaphorical. Stevens’ poem
works inversely: the metaphor of the man at sea is clearly and fundamentally a metaphor, whose
content, which is of secondary importance to the fact of its being a metaphor, is a narrative about
the physical world. Woolf turns the physical into the metaphorical; Stevens the metaphorical into
the physical.
Woolf and Stevens’ parallel sea narratives (if one may somewhat archly call them) reflect
their generic difference in their titles. To the Lighthouse directs the reader to the end point: “you,
reader, are going to travel, with the story, to ‘the lighthouse.’ You will begin, progress and then
achieve the goal.” “Prologues,” by contrast, directs the reader to a beginning. “You will progress,
but not just yet,” intimates the title. “only clarify, interminably, in preparation.” The title of
“Final Soliloquy” elegantly counterbalances, suggesting, as we have seen, an interminable
moment, the essence of lyric. And so, to the differences between Woolf and Stevens that I have
noted—that Woolf creates characters and Stevens minds, that Woolf dwells more in emotion and
Stevens in epistemology, that Woolf roots her work primarily in the physical, interpersonal
world and Stevens in the metaphorical, individual world—let me add another: that Woolf frames
22
Do not cite or circulate outside the 2009 Berkeley-Stanford English Graduate Conference
her work within termini while Stevens frames his within the interminable. Woolf’s “moments”
explore timelessness within these termini, while Stevens’ poems explore termini (i.e. narratives)
within a frame of timelessness.
Conclusion
These differences between Woolf’s lyrical narratives and Stevens’ narrative lyrics are
ones of degree: Woolf pursues epistemology and Stevens emotion with only slightly less
fervency than the other pursues the same; Woolf rejoices over metaphor and Stevens over the
physical, but each writer chooses the opposite realm as backbone; etc. Woolf and Stevens draw
on the others’ genre while retaining the foundations of their own. Thereby do they not disprove
traditional understandings of lyric and narrative, but rather show that a work in one of these
genres may absorb characteristics of the other without loss of generic identity.
Much work on the relation between Woolf and Stevens remains. Many other linguistic
and situational parallels abound between their writings, especially between later Stevens and
later Woolf. For example, it seems that both writers return again and again to the sun and the sea
as symbols of outer life and inner life, respectively. And both appeal frequently to geometrical
images, especially curved structures. (James Baird’s The Dome and the Rock is a beautiful study
of geometrical structure in Stevens. One can well imagine a similar book about Woolf.) Also
illuminating would be comparison of the writers’ attitudes towards birth and death. Finally,
beyond further study of the writers’ incorporation of the others’ genre, one might compare how
both draw on the genres of drama and music. Regarding drama, Woolf’s “play-poem,” The
Waves, especially riddled with Stevensian passages (as William Burney noted), merits
comparison to Stevens’ poetic dialogues. And regarding music, the many passages in Woolf
describing music might be read alongside the many Stevens poems that address the same. The
23
Do not cite or circulate outside the 2009 Berkeley-Stanford English Graduate Conference
connection between Woolf and Stevens has long remained unexplored; it is time to bring this
inner life out. Doing so will clarify both the inner lives of these writers and the outer life of their
time.
Bibliography
Andersson, Daniel. The Nothing That Is: The Structure of Consciousness in the Poetry of
Wallace Stevens. Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala Universitet, 2006.
Axelrod, Stephen Gould, and Helen Deese. Critical Essays on Wallace Stevens. Boston: G. K.
Hall & Co., 1988.
Bates, Milton J. “Stevens’ Books at the Huntington: An Annotated Checklist.” Parts I, II, Errata.
The Wallace Stevens Journal 2.3/4, 3.1/2, 3.3/4 (Fall 1978, Spring 1979, Fall 1979): 4561, 15-33, 70.
Burney, William. Wallace Stevens. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1968.
Cleghorn, Angus J. Wallace Stevens’ Poetics: The Neglected Rhetoric. New York: Palgrave,
2000.
Costello, Bonnie. “Narrative Secrets, Lyric Openings: Stevens and Bishop.” The Wallace Stevens
Journal 19.2 (Fall 1995): 180-200.
Dubrow, Heather. “The Interplay of Narrative and Lyric: Competition, Cooperation, and the
Case of the Anticipatory Amalgam.” Narrative 14:3 (October 2006) 254-71.
Forster, E. M. “Virginia Woolf.” Virginia Woolf: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Claire
Sprague. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1971.
Freedman, Ralph. The Lyrical Novel. Princeton, N.J: Princeton UP, 1963.
Kirkpatrick, Brownlee Jean, and Stuart N. Clarke, eds., A Bibliography of Virginia Woolf. New
York: Oxford UP, 2003.
King, Julia, and Laila Miletic-Vejzovik, eds., The Library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf.
Pullman, Washington: Washington State University Press, 2003.
Lee, Hermione. The Novels of Virginia Woolf. London: Methuen & Co., 1977.
Maeder, Beverly. Wallace Stevens’ Experimental Language: The Lion and the Lute. New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
24
Do not cite or circulate outside the 2009 Berkeley-Stanford English Graduate Conference
Majumdar, Robin, and Allen McLaurin, eds.. Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage. London:
Routledge, 1997.
Moynihan, Robert. “Checklist: Second Purchase, Wallace Stevens Collections, Huntington
Library.” The Wallace Stevens Journal 20.1 (Spring 1996): 76-103.
Richardson, Joan. Wallace Stevens: the Later Years. New York City: Beech Tree Books, 1988.
Rosenthal, Edna. Aristotle and Modernism: Aesthetic Affinities of T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens,
and Virginia Woolf. Eastbourne, UK: Sussex Academic Press, forthcoming July 2008.
Schneider, Daniel J. Symbolism: The Manichean Vision -- A Study in the Art of James, Conrad,
Woolf & Stevens. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1975.
Schwartz, Daniel. Narrative and Representation in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens: A Tune
Beyond Us, Yet Ourselves. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993.
Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems. 1954. New York: Vintage Books, 1982.
---------------------. The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination. New York:
Vintage Books, 1951.
---------------------. Collected Poetry and Prose. New York: Library of America / Penguin, 1997.
Troy, William. “Virginia Woolf: The Novel of Sensibility.” Virginia Woolf: A Collection of
Critical Essays, ed. Claire Sprague. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1971.
Woolf, Virginia. A Writer’s Diary. 1953. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1982.
--------------------. Granite and Rainbow. 1958. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1975.
--------------------. To the Lighthouse. 1927. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, Inc., [2001?].
--------------------. The Death of the Moth. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1942.
--------------------. The Waves. 1931. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, Inc., [2004?]
25