“He was describing, as all young poets are for ever describing, nature, and in order to match the shade of green precisely he looked (and here he showed more audacity than most) at the thing itself, which happened to be a laurel bush growing beneath the window. After that, of course, he could write no more. Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. . . . The shade of green Orlando now saw spoilt his rhyme and split his metre.”

—Virginia Wolfe, from Orlando, 1928.