“On or about 1922”: A Voyage through Poetics and Neurosis, asfound in Personal Letters

Abstract

Critical thinking of the 1910s forecast a tempestuous 1922, which scarcely requires any introduction. Frequently, formulations of parallel psychic states can be observed in most modernist manifestos even before 1922, such as Woolf’s proposition of material/spiritual novelists in “Modern Fiction” (1919) or Eliot’s intellectual/reflective poets in “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921). The Modernist mind is, for Eliot, as for Woolf or Pound, (as opposed to Victorian materiality) predominantly introverted, intellectual, centripetal, and schizophrenic. This paper, however, instead of focusing on the Modernist writings of 1922, explores the archival repertoire of personal letters exchanged between eminent modernists to unseal the “semi-transparent envelope” of their psychic interior. These personal letters, diaries and memoirs – filled with testimonials of events such as Woolf meeting Vita Sackville-West in December, or Katherine Mansfield finishing her final short story, “The Canary” – offer no less insight on the bond between poetics and neurosis than the literary marvels such as The Waste Land or Ulysses.