Item 90 - Copy letter from Virginia Woolf to R.C. Trevelyan

1 item: typed copy letter

52 Tavistock Square. - Has taken a long time to write about Bob's poem [in "Rimeless Numbers"?], though it 'delighted' her; summer in London is 'distracting'. Glad she 'let [Bob] off, partly at least, writing the "Epistola ad V.W."]; does not think she finds it 'so sympathetic' only because Bob 'uses so kind a word' about her; he is welcome to use the quotation, though if she had been 'writing more explicitly' she would have attempted to 'convey [her] respect and admiration for the de, as well as [her] slight distrust of their dominion over us. Thinks Bob's method allows him to be both 'personal and poetic', with a sense of the '[addressee's] influence, which breaks up the formality... very happily'. Likes the 'country part' in particular. As for the 'argument [of the poem]', supposes her 'plea for adventurous prose is not disinterested' and expects she would have been happy to leave prose alone had she been able to write poetry; in reading she sees 'quite plainly what poetry can do and prose can't', so the envy is not just on Bob's side. Comments on the 'lurid yellow light' of a thunderstorm in which she is writing.