When I first learned that Woolf 's provisional title for The Waves (1931) was The Moths, I was reminded of an anecdote one of my dance colleagues passed along to me several years ago. Legend has it that someone once asked Merce Cunningham—the late and extraordinarily great godfather of postmodern dance—why he so often set his movement to silence. Reportedly, he pointed to a moth that was flitting around a light, and he left it at that. I want to evoke that moment at the beginning of this paper to think about movement, attraction, and the other–than–human in Woolf 's novel.

Since The Waves is so often noted for its poetic qualities, I will begin this discussion with a claim about poetics. The question of the animal or of the inhuman as it is represented in poetry interests us particularly because poetics participates in the musical, the rhythmic, and the incantatory. More pointedly, as Jorie Graham repeatedly reminded her audience at the 2006 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, poetry must be understood as bodily experience. Graham was at some pains in her discussions that weekend to emphasize that reading and hearing poetry are not primarily mental, but corporeal processes. This claim is fairly startling; it gives us pause and opens onto a number of fascinating questions about the literary, the bodily, and even the creaturely.

Elizabeth Grosz's recent discussions of art and the organic help us situate Woolf's poetics. Working among theories ranging from Deleuze, to French feminism, and her own re–reading of Darwin's evolutionary theory, Grosz asserts in an interview with Julie Copeland that we need to understand art as “the revelry in the excess of nature, but also a revelry in the excess of the energy in our bodies” (“The Creative Impulse” 2). Grosz makes the distinctly posthumanist claim that “we're not the first artists and we're perhaps not even the greatest artists, we humans; we take our cue from the animal world. So what appeals to us? It's the striking beauty of flowers, it's the amazing colour of birds, it's the songs of birds” (2).