"Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry"
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Woolf is picking a fight with the tidy border patrol that keeps poetry on one side and “serious” prose on the other. Calling poetry “delicious” isn’t dainty praise; it’s a provocation. Deliciousness is bodily, immediate, faintly improper for a literary culture that liked to treat taste as either moral education or academic exercise. She’s insisting that language is meant to be felt, not merely parsed.
The second clause sharpens the blade: “the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.” Woolf isn’t arguing that prose should start line-breaking or chasing rhyme. She’s pointing to the poetic capacities prose can smuggle in: compression, rhythm, image, associative logic, the way a sentence can turn like a thought rather than march like an argument. In her hands, “poetry” becomes shorthand for intensity and attention - the power to render consciousness as it actually arrives, in waves and jolts and patterns, not in orderly bullet points.
Context matters: Woolf is writing against a late-Victorian and Edwardian tradition of authoritative, plot-first narration and the institutional voice of criticism that prized clarity as a kind of discipline. Modernism’s wager was that clarity can be a mask for deadness. Her subtext is almost political: when prose borrows poetry’s freedoms, it also resists the bureaucratic, patriarchal impulse to make experience legible only on approved terms. The “best” prose, she implies, isn’t the most correct. It’s the most alive.
The second clause sharpens the blade: “the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.” Woolf isn’t arguing that prose should start line-breaking or chasing rhyme. She’s pointing to the poetic capacities prose can smuggle in: compression, rhythm, image, associative logic, the way a sentence can turn like a thought rather than march like an argument. In her hands, “poetry” becomes shorthand for intensity and attention - the power to render consciousness as it actually arrives, in waves and jolts and patterns, not in orderly bullet points.
Context matters: Woolf is writing against a late-Victorian and Edwardian tradition of authoritative, plot-first narration and the institutional voice of criticism that prized clarity as a kind of discipline. Modernism’s wager was that clarity can be a mask for deadness. Her subtext is almost political: when prose borrows poetry’s freedoms, it also resists the bureaucratic, patriarchal impulse to make experience legible only on approved terms. The “best” prose, she implies, isn’t the most correct. It’s the most alive.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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