Poetry, prose, drama

To sum up the preceding discussion, Virginia Woolf's intentions as she began work on The Waves were at once to resume her formal experimentation, with its implied attack on the realistic novel, and to undertake philosophical investigations, searching for some metaphysical principle which transcended the local and personal interests of her previous work. The next ‘serious poetic experimental’ book was to be one in which modernism and mysticism would meet. What then, we may ask, were the formal consequences of these ambitions? How was she to adjust her technique to encompass these twin aims? These were questions which perplexed Woolf herself a good deal, and she was a long time in finding an answer. The prolonged gestation of The Waves and the false trail she followed in its initial version, The Moths, is a study unto itself – a study much facilitated by the labours of J. W. Graham, who has capably edited the two versions. (Students interested in this ‘archeological’ aspect of the work are referred to Graham's edition. Our concern is with the finished product, and consequently I focus on The Waves itself in this discussion, making reference to the earlier conception as needed to elucidate the final work.) As we shall see, the answer she finally found was extremely different from anything she had produced before, and these differences make themselves most keenly felt on the level of form, which, as she indicated, was now to be ‘closely considered’.

As usual, it is the diary which provides the first indications of what shape these ambitions were to take.