“why is poetry wholly an elderly taste?”

Woolf’s sense that the novel must respond to poetry is manifest in her first three novels—The Voyage Out (1915), Night and Day (1919), and Jacob’s Room (1922). In the first, she shows a keen ear for the sound of language, but poetry figures as patriarchal and arguably deadly. In the second, she explores conflicting attitudes toward the English poetic tradition, and poetry occupies a dual role, at once burden and aphrodisiac. And in the third, poetry serves as a tool Woolf adapts for her own use in prose. For four reasons, by 1922 Woolf was able to appreciate poetry of the past: a familiarity with contemporary poetry gained by printing at The Hogarth Press, the deaths of family members who had nurtured poetry’s discouraging associations, an interest in elegy after the personal loss of her brother and the collective loss during World War I, and a comfort with poetry’s techniques in the wake of the form’s diminished power. Strong evidence of Woolf’s turn toward poetry lies in the poetry books in her extant library.