Poetry in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own
According to Laurence Perrine, author of Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense, "poetry is as universal as language and almost as ancient"; however, "people have always been more successful at appreciating poetry than at defining it" (517). Perrine initially defines poetry as "a kind of language that says more and says it more intensely than does ordinary language" (517). After defining literature as writing concerned with experience which allows us to imaginatively participate in it (518-19), Perrine adds, "poetry takes all life as its province" (522); no sharp distinction between poetry and other forms of imaginative literature exists (523); and "poetry . . . is a kind of multidimensional language" because it appeals not only to our intelligence but also to "our senses, emotions, and imagination." Perrine points out that "poetry achieves its extra dimensions . . . by drawing more consistently than does ordinary language on a number of language resources, none of which is peculiar to poetry." Finally, Perrine asserts "it [poetry] must be an organism whose every part serves a useful purpose and cooperates with every other part to preserve and express the life that is within it" (524). Perrine states that poetry "has been regarded as something central to existence, something having unique value to the fully realized life, something we are better off for having and spiritually impoverished without" (517). Because mankind holds poetry in high regard, Virginia Woolf uses male versus female success in writing it as the basis of comparison in A Room of One's Own, her 1928 essay that examines the struggle of women for acceptance and esteem as writers. According to Woolf, rath...
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...on against women may appear to be an unusual topic, it also appeared in Lady Winchilsea's poetry. Woolf uses language in a multidimensional manner because she employs techniques that involve not only our intelligence but also our senses, emotions, and imagination: we savor the sole, chew the stringy beef, experience anger at the Oxbridge library because Woolf's expertise with the language puts us in the middle of these experiences. Those passages that have that extra brilliance do not detract from the more prosaic parts of the essay; rather, they impart life to it.
Works Cited
Jerome, Judson. The Poet's Handbook. Cincinnati: Writer's Digest Books, 1980.
Perrine, Laurence. Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense. 4th ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. San Diego, Calif. : Harvest-HBJ, 1989.
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