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Do not cite or circulate outside the 2009 Berkeley-Stanford English Graduate Conference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

narrative and lyric occurs in Modernist literature, as for instance in the literature of Virginia

Woolf (1884-1941) and Wallace Stevens (1879-1955).

1 Heather Dubrow, “The Interplay of Narrative and Lyric: Competition, Cooperation, and the Case of the Anticipatory Amalgam,” Narrative 14:3 (October 2006): 1.

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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

2 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.

3 Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1982): 102, 107, 103, respectively.

4 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 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).

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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

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

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.

6 Ralph Freedman, The Lyrical Novel (Princeton, N.J: Princeton UP, 1963) 185.

7 Freedman 187-188.

8 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.

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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

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

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.

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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,”

“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,

10 William Burney, Wallace Stevens (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1968) 177.

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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 Woolf-

Stevens 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,

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

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.

14 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.?

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.

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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

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

16 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. 56.17

? Julia King and Laila Miletic-Vejzovik, eds., The Library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf (Pullman, Washington: Washington State University Press, 2003).

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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

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.

18 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).

19 Richardson, vol. 2, 52.

20 Robin Majumdar and Allen McLaurin, eds., Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1997) 87.

21 Richardson, vol. 2, 170 and 434. Folios is part of the small Stevens’ library owned by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

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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

“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

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).

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“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

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,

23 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.

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“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

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. . .

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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

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

24 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.”

25 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

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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;

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

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.

26 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).

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“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

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

27 Woolf, Granite and Rainbow 143.28

? Ibid. 145.

29 Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems (New York: Vintage Books, 1982) 67.

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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

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

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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

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

30 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

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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.

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

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.

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(“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. . .

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

31 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.

18


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).

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

32 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).

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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

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

33 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).

20


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

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.

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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

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

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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

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

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Burney, William. Wallace Stevens. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1968.

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