Righthand page of a diary with an entry handwritten in blue ink

Virginia Woolf’s diary

Four photographs matted together showing T.S. Eliot at various ages, as a child standing and seated reading in a rocking chair, as an adult leaning against a wall with a cane, and as an older man seated with a book on a porch

Four photographs of T.S. Eliot

Back side of a letter written in blue ink and signed by Virginia Woolf

The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf. Website users can make copies of the Works under general copyright exceptions, but cannot further copy, share or adapt the Works, or use them for commercial purposes.

Letter from Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) to David Garnett (1892–1981)
October 20, 1922
Virginia Woolf Collection of Papers, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature

Letter from Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) to David Garnett (1892–1981)

At an intimate gathering at Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s home in June 1922, T.S. Eliot read his not-yet-published poem The Waste Land. “He sang it & chanted it rhymed it,” Woolf recorded in her diary. “It has great beauty & force of phrase: symmetry; & tensity.” Months later, it was still ringing in her mind, as recorded in this letter to fellow writer and publisher David Garnett: “I have only the sound of it in my ears, when he read it aloud; and have not yet tackled the sense. But I liked the sound.”

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