Diary entry

Virginia Woolf was a lifelong diarist, and her journals reveal deep connections with other modernist writers and their work. In this entry, Woolf hints at lukewarm feelings for James Joyce and records the first time she met T.S. Eliot: “He produced 3 or 4 poems for us to look at—the fruit of two years …. I became more or less conscious of a very intricate & highly organised framework of poetic belief; owing to his caution, & his excessive care in the use of language we did not discover much about it. I think he believes in ‘living phrases’ & their difference from dead ones; in writing with extreme care, in observing all syntax & grammar; & so making this new poetry flower on the stem of the oldest.”