The very reason why that poetry excites one to such abandonnment, such rapture, is that it celebrates some feeling that one used to have (at luncheon parties before the war perhaps), so that one responds easily, familiarly, without troubling to check the feeling, or to compare it with any that one has now. But the living poets express a feeling that is actually being made and torn out of us at the moment. One does not recognize it in the first place ; often for some reason one fears it ; one watches it with keenness and compares it jealously and suspiciously with the old feeling that one knew. Hence the difficulty of modern poetry ; and it is because of this difficulty that one cannot remember more that two consecutive lines of any good modern poet.



Virigina Woolf, A Room of One's Own