Thomas Hardy, poetry
Tradition:
Victorian: Wordsworth, Tennyson, Arnold, Rossetti, Browning, Swinburne, Hopkins
Modernists: Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Auden [prose: Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Mansfield]
Non-modernists: Hardy, [Georgians], Lawrence, Graves, Larkin, Heaney
-- Georgians (published 1911-12): W. H. Davies, Edmund Blunden, Rupert Brooke, Edward ThomasT. S. Eliot: "The Waste Land" (1921) 2614 (fragmentary; extensive notes);
-- "Tradition" (1919) 2639, esp. 2641, 2644; espouses typically modernist positionsHardy. 1840-1928. Introduction, 2317-8. Note: doesn't mention his marriages: Emma (m.1874; d.1912); Florence (m.1914; d. 1937)
"The Voice": http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/928.html
"The Ruined Maid" -- YouTube reading, actor with Dorset accent
Guerard, Albert J., Ed. Hardy: A Collection of Critical Essays (1963).Schwartz, Delmore. "Poetry and Belief in Thomas Hardy"
Hardy's belief in a "First or Fundamental Energy" (foreward to The Dynasts): affirmed in opposition to the concept of an intelligent and omnipotent being; and in opposition to human's bland disregard of how their lives are shaped by cosmic and evolutionary forces (124).
Tension between new scientific view and old religious or humanist views (late 19th C). Hardy not an atheist; rather, as if he had taken the characteristics assigned to God and systematically reversed them (125). Cf. "Hap"
His sense of history and the rural past in particular (e.g., "The Ruined Maid"; "Channel Firing")
Hardy's reaction to the universe often brought into his poems. The details give the poem in question a metaphorical significance. But the beliefs are present not as ideas but as experience, as a modification of the poet's sensibility (128, 133-4). Cf. "The Darkling Thrush"
Auden, W. H. "A Literary Transference"
"Hardy had been born in an agricultural community virtually untouched by industrialism and urban values, and when he died its disintegration was almost complete" (139).
Perkins, David. "Hardy and the Poetry of Isolation"
Hardy's "urgent preoccupation in his poetry with the hurt of aloneness." Not only explicit statement, but also"the fact that the protagonist almost always appears as a solitary, an outsider, or an individual alienated from the life of his fellow" (143). Thus many of Hardy's poems can be described "as a fingering of the theme of isolation and an exploration of roads out of the dilemma -- roads which are inevitably obstructed by a nagging honesty to his own experience" (143).
The birth of consciousness in the human race: not a destined evolution, but "a mutation, not expected or allowed for in the pattern of the cosmos, and the accidental cause of pain" (145).
A way out of the impasse? -- two roads, one of resigned unawareness, the other of visionary hope in transcendence (as in Blake, Wordsworth). But both roads "blocked for Hardy by his helpless honesty to his own experience, which he can neither elude nor transform in accordance with what he might desire" (158).
Hynes, Samuel. "The Dynasts as an Example"
Note that Hardy's protagonist in The Dynasts is Napoleon, "a man against the world -- lonely and isolated even at the moment of his greatness" (162).
God: "a term which is, for Hardy, a private personification of the mindless, indifferent force which propels the universe" (164). (Cf. "Hap")
Document prepared February 4th 2007 / updated February 4th 2009