You see, you accomplish so much. You are one perpetual Achievement; yet you give the impression of having infinite leisure. One comes to see you: you are prepared to spend two hours of Time in talk. One may not, for reasons of health, come to see you: you write divine letters, four pages long. You read bulky manuscripts. You advise grocers. You support mothers, vicariously. You produce books which occupy a permanent place on one’s bedside shelf next to Gerard MANLY Hopkins and the Bible. You cast a beam across the dingy landscape of the Times Literary Supplement. You change people’s lives. You set up type. You offer to read and criticise one’s poems, - cirticise, in the sense which you have given to the word, meaning illumination, not the complete disheartenment which is the legacy of other critics. How is it done?
Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf (via
vwvw)
53 notes
- ? Sep 17th 2012