The Waves as “saturated” Novel

Since Jacob’s Room, Woolf’s fiction had incorporated three tools borrowed from poetry: the lyric “I,” figurative language, and aural recurrence. These tools find their clearest expression in The Waves (1931), which Woolf described as “prose yet poetry; a novel & a play.” This chapter analyzes The Waves with respect to these three tools, and then considers the book’s genre. Since its publication, many critics have received it—and other work by Woolf—as prose poetry and free verse. But to read Woolf as writing in these genres is to disregard authorial intent and historical context, to impose associations and conventions on work conceived without them. And lineating Woolf’s prose to “reveal” it as free verse betrays a confusion of lineation with poetry. Woolf’s vexation with the word “novel” reflects her effort to expand the meaning of the term. One way to honor this expansion is to use the term to describe the work of hers that seems least novel-like.