The Male Siskin and his Dear Aunt

Abstract

Julian Bell, a poet and Woolf’s nephew, was a friendly aggravation generative to some of Woolf’s most significant work. Both the content and the form of The Waves (1931) owe much to Woolf’s relationship with him. With regard to content, the book’s depiction of college life and of young male poets derives in part from Bell’s social world and personality. With regard to form, Woolf’s association of poetry with metaphoric thought was reinforced by Bell’s literal verse. The drafts of The Waves and of a lampoon Woolf wrote on Bell inform the latter argument. This chapter then shows that in writing “A Letter to a Young Poet” (1932), Woolf had in mind her nephew’s “The Progress of Poetry: A Letter to a Contemporary” (1930). This chapter concludes with a study of the manuscript draft of “A Letter to a Young Poet.” Here Woolf writes as though the poet and the novelist have the same task—which, I argue, they do not.