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"I went on to wonder if honestly one could name two living poets now as great as Tennyson and Christina Rossetti were then. Obviously, it is impossible, I thought, looking onto those foaming waters, to compare them. The very reason why the poetry excites one to such abandonment, 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 than two consecutive lines of any good modern poet... Why has Alfred ceased to sing She is coming, my dove, my dear? Why has Christina ceased to respond My heart is gladder than all these/Because my love is come to me? ? Shall we lay the blame on the war? When the guns fired in August, 1914, did the faces of men and women show so plain in each other's eyes that romance was killed?" --Virgina Woolf, "A Room of One's Own", 1929