| British modern novelist Virginia Woolf was famous for her brilliant literary talent in the literary world. Whenever we talk about her, we'll think about the stream of consciousness. The modern stream of consciousness literary technique is a combination of modern psychology, modern philosophy and literature. As a writer of stream of consciousness literature, she has developed the stream of consciousness novels from realist spirit with quite a new writing technique through careful observations and deep thoughts about life essence.This paper elaborates Woolf's art of literary creation by analyzing her famous novel To the Lighthouse from three aspects: stream of consciousness literary techniques, poetics and musical feature.The first part deals with the use of modern stream of consciousness literary techniques: indirect inner monologue; free association; narrating in different points of view; epiphany and time montage. In Woolf's novels, characters' spiritual world is always in the leading position. In order to reflect the inner world of her characters in a true and provoking way, she made the full use of her unique stream of consciousness literary techniques. Indirect inner monologue can control its readers' responses and attitudes to characters. Free association can reflects characters' different personalities and their attitudes towards life. Narrating in different points of view can improve the sense of reality. Time montage can fully reflect characters' experiences at different time and create a three-dimensional effect. To control characters' stream of consciousness in a better way, the author utilized epiphany as her time framework of narration, too.Woolf was not only a novelist of stream of consciousness, but also a poet. With the edifying influence of all kinds of art, Woolf established her unique poetic theory and created a special sort of poetic novel. It's really hard for us to find such kind of poetics in the works of other novelists of stream of consciousness, such as Joyce and Faulkner. In reality, when we talk about novels of stream of consciousness, we refer mainly to its writing techniques. Many novelists who belong to other literary groups may also use the techniques to a certain degree. Hence, when we make a comment on the writing art of Woolf's works, it's partial to discuss her techniques of stream of consciousness only without mentioning her poetics at all. The second part of the paper elaborates mainly the poetics of To the Lighthouse by analyzing its lyric, figurative, natural and symbolic features. Lyric feature is a key feature in poetic novel. This novel completely reflects Woolf's different kinds of feeling: her respecting feeling to ideal characters, her praising feeling to the nature, the love to life, the pursuit to the idealism, and the hatred to death and war. Another poetic feature is the use of metaphor. By using different kinds of metaphor, Woolf beautified her language as well as the mood of her works. There are many paragraphs of the vivid description about the nature and some of them have already become the masterpieces in British literature Symbolization is the fourth feature. The novel is full of symbolic things and setting: the island with unknown name, the three subtitles, the different colors and the hedge, etc. Besides her poetic nature, Woolf's attainments on music and painting are very obvious, too. This was due to her special life experience. It's a common phenomenon that novelists of stream of consciousness like to use music for reference. But Woolf had a better ability to understand music. Almost all her novels of stream of consciousness were put in a musical framework. Among them, To the Lighthouse is the most typical one. The third part concentrates on her use of the techniques on music creation for reference: leitmotiv motivation; counterpoint; and sonata form. The use of the techniques on music creation reflects Woolf's peculiar request to the aesthetic forms. So the novel can arouse the sympathetic response among its readers. By...
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