A Letter to a Young Poet

‘So long as you and you and you, venerable and ancient representatives of Sappho, Shakespeare and Shelley, are aged precisely twenty-three and propose… to spend the next fifty years of your lives in writing poetry, I refuse to think that the art is dead.’Penned in response to a letter about her novel The Waves from a young poet, John Lehmann, A Letter to a Young Poet answers a request for Woolf to set down her views on modern poetry. Written with observational humour and empathy, the letter leaves the reader laughing in recognition of the errors depicted, with the words ‘And for heaven’s sake, publish nothing before you are thirty’ ringing in their ears.