Woolf’s earliest known poem is a quatrain written (c.1892) for the Hyde Park Gate News, the whimsical newspaper that she and her siblings produced. A mother looking after her sick son, as Woolf’s mother did for many in need, is compared to a predatory animal: “Like the vulture hovers / O’er the dieing horse / thinking ever thinking / that her boy is slowly sinking”. Already, at ten years old, Woolf understood the comic power of a perverse image and a dippy rhyme. “Ode written partly in prose on seeing the name of Cutbush above a butcher’s shop in Pentonville” (1934) is, as the immoderate title suggests, a narrative poem that exceeds the bounds of poetry. “Fantasy upon a Gentleman Who Converted His Impressions of a Private House into Cash” (1937), meanwhile, is a satire that uses occasional rhyme to skewer a journalist’s complacency (“his lack of attraction; his self-satisfaction”).

Equally, Woolf’s novels are full of poets and readers of poetry, from the Tennyson-quoting Mr Ramsay in To the Lighthouse to the pompous would-be poets Louis, Bernard and Neville in The Waves. She wrote original lyric poetry and dramatic verse for the pageant at the heart of her final book, Between the Acts. In fact, Woolf’s experimental achievement is sometimes said…

For more, see the Times Literary Supplement