A Letter to a Young Poet is an epistolary essay by Virginia Woolf, written in 1932 to John Lehman, laying out her views on modern poetry.

In 1932, Woolf responded to a letter from the writer, John Lehmann, about her novel The Waves (1931) in which he asked her to write about her views on modern poetry.

In Woolf's view poetry demands both facility in introspection, as well as a deep understanding of the human species.

"a work of renovation… has to be done from time to time and was certainly needed, for bad poetry is almost always the result of forgetting oneself...all becomes distorted and impure if you lose sight of that central reality"Woolf argues that indeed it is the intersection of that understanding of oneself and one's understanding of humanity that underlies the essential nature of writing "-now… that poetry has done all this, why should it not once more open its eyes, look out of the window and write about other people?

[4] As elsewhere in her literary criticism, such as "Modern Fiction", she felt that the writer has to come to terms with the reality of everyday life, "the common objects of daily prose—the bicycle and the omnibus".