The English reading public explains the reason why. I shall write a book some day about the appropriateness of names. Geoffrey Chaucer has a ribald ring, as is proper and correct, and Alexander Pope was inevitably Alexander Pope. Virginia Stephens is not a name for an exploratory authoress. I think a child should be allowed to take his father's or mother's name at will on coming of age.
Paternity is a legal fiction.
Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. Stephen Dedalus, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ch. There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being. Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honoured by posterity because he was the last to discover America.