Virginia Woolf’s poetic fiction
I’m late with this in terms of Dalloway Day 2022 but it’s on a rather constant theme in writing, that of expression and form. It’s from a longer piece in preparation.
That there is a poetic element in Woolf’s prose writing is hardly a new thought. But I think some of her short fiction contains some particularly interesting examples of this literary feature.
Monday or Tuesday is the only collection of short fiction Woolf published in her lifetime. Her experimental fiction in that book is generally seen as avant-texte for the novels. One story in the collection, “Kew Gardens” (begun 1917, published 12 May1919), contains sustained sections of poetic writing about Nature. The beginning:
From the oval shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart shaped or tongue shaped leaves halfway up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface; and from the red, blue or yellow gloom of the throat emerged a straight bar, rough with gold dust and slightly clubbed at the end.
Thus we find a space in which natural things grow, an organic space touched it seems by a miniature spectrum of three primary colors. As the passage continues, the colors are spoken of as “lights” and we are told “the colour was flashed into the air above, into the eyes of the men and women who walk in Kew Gardens in July.” […]
And thus my beginning. More information later. Happy Dalloway Day to all !