ABSTRACT
The significance of the poetic both as a way of perceiving and also as a mode of expression is constantly referred to in Virginia Woolf's diary in the mid-1920s. She eventually formulated her thoughts on this subject in an essay that was published in the same year as To the Lighthouse. Much of the appeal of To the Lighthouse lies in the rich specificity of the real ordinary everyday life experience of these people; density and profundity are given to it through the poetic exploration of the general implications of the particular. Part I of the novel is rich and alive ultimately because there Mrs Ramsay is alive and richly generous in her gift of herself to others. Part II creates a vision of a world in which she is both literally and metaphorically absent, a world in which there is no coherence, one in which there is, instead, death and suffering, war and anguish.
