Reviving/Revising “Lycidas”: Virginia Woolf’s Elegy to Unborn Poets in A Room of One’s Own
The epitome of late Renaissance pastoral elegy, “Lycidas” haunts many a Modernist poem or novel, from The Waste Land to Ulysses, as a contested subtext, the expression of a poetics of grief that could no longer hold after the First World War, and yet whose grip on the Modernist imagination remained...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Centre de Recherche "Texte et Critique de Texte"
2024-12-01
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| Series: | Sillages Critiques |
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| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/16887 |
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| Summary: | The epitome of late Renaissance pastoral elegy, “Lycidas” haunts many a Modernist poem or novel, from The Waste Land to Ulysses, as a contested subtext, the expression of a poetics of grief that could no longer hold after the First World War, and yet whose grip on the Modernist imagination remained strong. A Room of One’s Own is no exception: Woolf’s allusion to Milton’s poem in the liminal section of her essay, when she introduces the issue of women’s denied access to education, unfulfilled aspirations and unexpressed talent, is all but gratuitous. Whereas, in “Lycidas,” John Milton mourns a young aspiring poet who died prematurely, and thus strives to leave his mark on a long-established tradition, Woolf finds herself in the paradoxical position of mourning female poets who never came to existence, because “they had no tradition behind them,” a loss for which there can be no aesthetic compensation. To offer an alternative to the canonical, androcentric configuration of pastoral elegy, Woolf symbolically untwines the wreath of artistic consecration, woven in the opening lines of “Lycidas,” and returns the image of the laurel crown to its metamorphic instability: the flight of Daphne as unlimited creative potential and endless pursuit. |
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| ISSN: | 1272-3819 1969-6302 |