review Poetry
Stories in Verse
Virginia Woolf once wrote a letter to a young poet friend, advising him to avoid the all-too-frequent trap of writing exclusively about “one single person”—himself. “Two hundred or three hundred years ago,” she remarks, “you [poets] were always writing about other people. Your pages were crammed with characters of the most opposite and various kinds—Hamlet, Cleopatra, Falstaff.” Woolf admired the strength and versatility of writers who could imaginatively inhabit and portray characters other than themselves. As such, she concludes saying that the best recipe for success in poetry is to “embark upon a long poem in which people as unlike yourself as possible talk at the tops of their voices.” In other words, she advised her friend to write narrative verse.