CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Issue 106 of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany

Summer 2027

Special Topic: Woolf and the Affordances of Poetry

Guest editor: Lesley Higgins

Submissions should be no longer than 2500 words

(including the Works Cited)

Submissions are due 29 March 2027

Please send your submission to: 19higgins55@gmail.com

            To read the most challenging poetry effectively, Woolf declares in The Waves, “one must have myriad eyes.... One must be skeptical, but throw caution to the winds and when the door opens accept absolutely. Also sometimes weep.” For this special topic of the Miscellany, contributions are sought that consider specific aspects of Woolf’s engagement with poetic discourse. (In other words, analyses that go beyond the merely or vaguely appreciative, such as John Lehmann’s tribute that, “Virginia Woolf was to remain more poet than novelist, forever searching for new means of dissolving prose into poetry.”)

            How does an understanding of Woolf’s responses to poetry and its techniques (including rhythmic effects; verbal patterning; mainstays such as alliteration, anaphora, and assonance) help one to assess her prose more effectively? (As she suggests in the 1927 essay “Poetry, Fiction, and the Future,” the “different kinds” of “so-called novels” imaginable “will be written in prose, but in prose which has many of the characteristics of poetry.”) How would you define the after-lives of poets from Milton to Tennyson to Hopkins in her texts, and how are Woolf’s intertextual practices related to reading pleasure, to satire, and to critique?

            This special issue will include only academic studies, not creative responses.

Topics could include:

●  Woolf’s engagement with individual poets (such as W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Catullus, T. S. Eliot, Wilfrid Owen, Percy Bysshe Shelley) and poetic dramatists (such as Euripides, William Shakespeare)

●  Scenes of reading poetry in the novels—how do they contribute to the texts overall?

●  Generic implications and generic fluidity: Woolf and (for example) epic, elegy, ode, prose- poem, satire

●  How best to respond to her 1926 comment to Vita Sackville-West, “my God Vita, if you happen to know do wire what is the essential difference between prose and poetry—it cracks my poor brain to consider”

●  The affordances of poetry in and for her essays

●  How Woolf challenges the “three schools of [poetry] criticism” (“the refluent sea-music school; the line-irregularity school, and the school that bids one not to criticise but cry” “ ‘I am Christina Rossetti,’” 1930)

●  The Hogarth Press and poetry

For examples of recent work on this topic, see Rachael Isom, Modern Fiction Studies (Fall 2025); Woolf Studies Annual, vol. 30 (2024); Emily Kopley, Virginia Woolf and Poetry (2021); Harvena Richter, Virginia Woolf Miscellany, no. 57 (Spring 2001).