The two-hundred-year-old archive of The Yale Review is replete with gorgeous poetry and prose from Robert Frost, Rita Dove, W. E. B. Du Bois, and John Cheever. Over the years, we have digitized archival pieces now and again, but this year we launched From the Archives, a weekly feature in which we unearth gems from our back issues and publish them on our website. We like to gather these pieces into small collections linked by theme or author, accompanied by commentary on the work. We were fortunate to have the novelist Claire Messud introduce our trove of essays by Virginia Woolf: “The marvelous archive of Woolf’s pieces for TYR makes clear that each essay forms part of a cohesive whole: a radical vision of the literary process,” Messud writes. “In Woolf’s conception, all parties—writer, reader, and critic—are engaged in acts of selfless creativity.” It was no surprise to us that four of Woolf’s essays made this year’s list of most-read pieces, including our readers’ perennial top pick, “How Should One Read a Book?” We hope you enjoy turning (or returning) to some of our old favorites.
—the editors
“How Should One Read a Book?” by Virginia Woolf
In this essay, which is key to understanding her approach to fiction, Woolf argues that the best readers are those who read a book as if they were writing it.
“‘The Waste Land’ Revisited” by Helen Vendler
The esteemed late poetry critic, renowned for her close readings, attends to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
“The Burning Heart” by Louise Glück
“I thought / we were not responsible / any more than we were responsible / for being alive.”
“The Mirror” by Haruki Murakami, as translated by Philip Gabriel
Murakami’s spare and dreamlike “ghost” story centers on self-reflection.
“Letter to a Young Poet” by Virginia Woolf
“People say, there can be no relation between the poet and the present age. But surely that is nonsense,” Woolf writes in this meditation on poetry (and prose) addressed to the “young poet” John Lehmann.
“A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be” by Ursula K. Le Guin
Le Guin presents a lecture on the dynamic nature of utopia.
“‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’” by James Merrill
“The mere thought of commenting upon T. S. Eliot undoes me,” Merrill declares in this brief examination of Eliot’s famous poem.
“Some Other, Better Otto” by Deborah Eisenberg
Eisenberg, master of the short form, tackles the messy complexities of family relationships in this moving story.
“A Conversation About Art” by Virginia Woolf
Woolf experiments with genre, disguising a review of the artist Walter Sickert’s 1934 exhibition as a meandering dinner-party discussion.
“Street Haunting: A London Adventure” by Virginia Woolf
Step outside for a solitary walk, no matter the pretext, Woolf writes, and you become “a central oyster of perceptiveness,” reveling in possibilities.