Epilogue

Abstract

Toward the end of her life, Woolf’s resentment of the male poetic tradition and rivalry with the poetic present were displaced by affection for this tradition and for the deep poetic past. This attitude comes through in “Anon” (1979), an essay that honors the anonymous poets of medieval England, and in Between the Acts (1941), in which a country pageant surveying British history draws an anxious community together. Having drawn on the tools of lyric poetry in earlier works, now Woolf includes original poetry of her own, both lyric and dramatic. Manuscript drafts reveal how the lyric poetry evolved. It was initially allusive, polyvocal, and sometimes in verse. In the published novel, it is less allusive, monovocal, and exclusively in prose. The elegiac tone of Between the Acts manifested privately, as well: Woolf’s late letters and diaries are full of allusions to canonical British elegies. Woolf’s farewell to poetry serves as the farewell to this book.