Contradictory Woolf : I believe there is hardly a topic where Woolf's contradictions are more evident than in her relationship with poetry, with poets, with poetic forms. In fact, while adjectives such as “poetic” or “lyrical” are of ten resorted to when dealing with her literary output, Woolf never published a line of poetry. And even when she tried to write poetry, it was in a definitely contradictory spirit, evident, for instance, in the title of her poem Ode Written Partly in Prose on Seeing the Name of Cutbush Above a Butcher's Shop in Pentonville. Furthermore, among the things she insists on “not knowing,” beside Greek and French, we find poetry: Woolf might have felt so confident as to give advice to a young poet, answering the question “about poetry and its death” (E5 308), but, at the same time, she did not hesitate to claim that “[t]he lack of a sound university training has always made it impossible for me to distinguish between an iambic and a dactyl” (E5 308).

But, I may say, poetry —and the same could be argued for Greek and French—plays a crucial role in Woolf's literary achievement. Woolf was well aware of the importance of literary genres: of course, they may be debunked, discarded; their boundaries may be blurred; but there they are, one has to deal with them. And Woolf did not refrain from her task: as a writer, she tried to realize a blend between prose and poetry; as a critic, she dedicated several essays to her understanding of literary genres; and, last but not least, the Hogarth Lectures on Literature series stands as a further confirmation of her interest in the notions of genres and subgenres. Those were very important not only for the sake of literature, but also, from the publisher's point of view, for sales: this is evident, for example, in her diary entry on the launch of Orlando: “Not a shop will buy save in 6es & 12es. They say this is inevitable. No one wants biography. But it is a novel, says Miss Ritchie. But it is called a biography on the title page, they say.