Even as the great poet that Virginia Woolf discerned and studied in what she called “legendary” encounters at Lady Ottoline Morrell's beginning in late 1930 (D3 329-32; L4 250, 253), W. B. Yeats's occultly philosophic “Dove or Swan” section of A Vision (1925), might have been playfully mocked in Orlando, insof ar as the history of art and the story of women and fiction coalesce in the progress of a Zeitgeist inspired by Vita Sackville-West and her family history. Ifthis is an example of contradictory behavior, Yeats was almost as reluctant to read the novel as he was to undertake, in multiple encounters, Joyce's Ulysses, much preferring to either of those works Lawrence's Women in Love. He wrote to his wife, late in 1932, that he found the latter “a beautiful enigmatic book. I feel in sympathy with him as I do not with Virginia Woolf ” (CL Intelex 5774). At first, Woolf found Yeats difficult to understand. But, at another party at Lady Ottoline's, he flattered her by acknowledging that he was writing about her later novel The Waves, which, with Joyce's Ulysses and Pound's Cantos, suggested to him “a deluge of [mental and physical] experience breaking over us and within us” (qtd. in D4 n255).

Hermione Lee devotes three pages, in her life of Woolf (574-7), to the first encounter as an illustration of Woolf's mixing together contradictions in the accounts she made in her diary and letters. Lee draws on the testimony of Lady Ottoline and Walter de la Mare, but not on Yeats, for some reason. Thus I will present the evidence of Yeats's unpublished correspondence, particularly a letter to his wife of 8 November 1930, and drafts of the poem he wrote inside the back cover of his rather heavy travel book, Johann Erdmann's A History of Philosophy, trans. Williston Hough, vol. 2: Modern Philosophy (London: Allen and Unwin, 1924). As Yeats said, “Spilt Milk” was “the upshot of my talks and a metaphor of Lady Ottoline's,” in spite of Virginia's exaggerated recollection of her own share of the conversation. So in a way, this paper is as much about this mutual friend as it is about Woolf and Yeats.