I'm copying out Virginia Woolf's essay about Elizabeth Barrett Browning, watching clumps of new snow fall off the trees, listening to the clock tick.
VW writes: "How far we are going to read a poet when we can read about a poet is a problem to lay before biographers."
EBB writes: "But how willingly I would as a poet exchange some of this lumbering, ponderous, helpless knowledge of books, for some experience of life, and man, for some . . . "
Those are her ellipses, and they make me sad.
Dawn,
ReplyDeleteInteresting that you mention EBB and that particular quote. Just this morning I read a passage quoted from a letter from Benjamin Haydon to EBB, in which Haydon recalls -- in a callous and ironic tone -- the attempted suicide of Leigh Hunt's sister-in-law. I suspect that EBB didn't share Haydon's unkind joviality at that story.
I suspect you're absolutely right, David.
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