The following essay consists of two extracts from the author's introduction to his collection, An Historical Evaluation of Thomas Hardy's Poetry (see bibliography). They are reproduced here with permission from the publisher, and have been slightly adapted for this website. The intervening pages consist of close readings of several poems, including the early "Neutral Tones" and the later "After a Journey".
Hardy's Return to Poetry
"l wanted to write poetry in the beginning; now I can" — Thomas Hardy, during a visit to Oxford in 1920, qtd. in Florence Hardy, p.52
n retrospect, it seems inevitable that Thomas Hardy, after a long career as a novelist, should have devoted himself exclusively to writing poetry during the last thirty years of his life. His second wife, Florence, had noted that "the poetic tendency had been his from the earliest"; she went on to quote Hardy himself: "A sense of the truth of poetry, of
its supreme place in literature, had awakened itself in me. At the risk of ruining all my worldly prospects I dabbled in it ... was forced out of it ... It came back upon me" (415). During the long period of forced literary exile from this genre, he had secured his future, both financially and as a literary figure, and was now able, in his late fifties, to go back to poetry — not only because he was in a position to follow his original bent, but for the added reason that he felt the novel to be no longer adequate to express his artistic vision. He decided to:
abandon at once a form of literary art he had long intended to abandon at some indefinite time, and resume openly that form which had always been more instinctive with him, and which he had just been able to keep alive from his early years, half in secrecy, under the pressure of magazine writing. He abandoned it with all the less reluctance in that the novel was, in his own words, "gradually losing artistic form, with a beginning, middle and end, and becoming a spasmodic inventory of items, which has nothing to do with art." [309]
Perhaps an equally important factor was the accusation that his novels propounded his "pessimistic philosophy." The persistent attacks that were directed against the "ideas" contained in his novels led him to adopt the verse-form because he believed that here he could express his unconventional views with impunity:
Perhaps I can express inverse ideas and emotions which run counter to the inert crystalized opinion — hard as rock — which the vast body of men have vested interests in supporting. To cry out in a passionate poem that (for instance) the Supreme Mover or Movers, the Prime Force or Forces, must be either limited in power, unknowing or cruel — which is obvious enough, and has been centuries — will cause them merely a shake of the head: but to put it in argumentative prose will make them sneer, or foam, and set all the literary contortionists jumping upon me, a harmless agnostic, as if I were a clamouring atheist, which in their crass illiteracy they seem to think is the same thing ... If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the Inquisition might have left him alone. [qtd. in Hardy 302]
Although it proved to be fortunate for his later readers that Hardy turned to poetry (and I shall argue that in every sense it was the right choice), ironically, writing in verse did not give him the immunity that he had hoped for. Thus we find him writing, in a letter to Alfred Noyes in the last decade of his life:
... it has always been my misfortune to presuppose a too intelligent reading public, and no doubt people will go on thinking that I really believe the Prime Mover to be a malignant old gentleman, a sort of King of Dahomey — an idea which so far from my holding it, is to me irresistibly comic. "What a fool I must have been to write for such a public!" is the inevitable reflection at the end of one's life. [qtd. in Hardy 439]
It has to be admitted, however, that Hardy was at least partly to blame for creating such an impression in his readers. Throughout his writings — prose, verse, letters, prefaces, even in the entries he made in his note-books and private journals — he felt obliged to explain and rationalise his "philosophy"; only to claim immunity against criticism by pleading that he was simply writing as a poet. For instance, in reply to a correspondent's letter about the "philosophy of The Dynasts," Hardy gave a detailed account of his thought in the poem and concluded by remarking that the "first and the second parts [of The Dynasts] already published, and some of the poems in Poems of the Past and the Present, exhibit fairly enough the whole philosophy." This was followed by a rider which Hardy "ghosted" through his wife: "Concerning Hardy's remark in this letter on the Unconscious Will being an idea already current, though that its growing awareness of Itself might be newer, and that there might be discrepancies in the Spirits' philosophy, it might be stated that he had felt such questions of priority and discrepancy to be immaterial where the work was offered as a poem and not as a system of thought" (Hardy 361).
This would seem to indicate, for the reader, a basic contradiction in Hardy: on the one hand he felt the urge to philosophise about his conception of the nature of life which was being influenced by the scientific and philosophical thinkers of the time, and on the other hand he did not feel any obligation either to present his philosophy in a consistent, systematic manner or indeed to defend it intellectually. However, Hardy himself did not see any contradiction in this. It was not that he was intellectually deficient: he was an ideally intelligent writer; but his interest in life and ideas was mainly that of a poet. That is to say, he was concerned primarily with the human and emotional implications of his ideas about life.
Hardy was greatly interested in the controversial ideas and polemical writings of the period, and it can legitimately be claimed that his poetic vision was in many ways shaped by the intellectual climate of late nineteenth-century England: he was drawn to the thinkers of his time because of his interrogative turn of mind. Irving Howe has suggested that though Hardy had always admired William Barnes, he also discovered an affinity with George Crabbe, but for a different, and perhaps a more important, reason. Howe explains that after Barnes died, "Hardy printed a tribute which suggests in passing the difference in scope between the two poets." In his tribute, Hardy wrote:
Mr Barnes never assumed the highly conventional style; he entirely leaves alone ambition, pride, despair, defiance and other of the grand passions ... His rustics are, as a rule, happy people, and seldom feel the sting of the rest of mankind — the disproportion between the desire for serenity and power of obtaining it. One naturally thinks of Crabbe in this connection; but though they touch at points, Crabbe goes much farther than Barnes in questioning the justice of circumstance. Their pathos, after all, is the attribute upon which the poems must depend for their endurance.... [qtd. in Howe 9]
Howe sees the reference to Crabbe as "very much to the point, since at least part of Hardy's verse can be regarded as, roughly, a bringing together of Barnes and Crabbe (who was, Hardy later told a friend, 'the earliest influence in the direction of realism' upon him)." There is certainly no question about Hardy's affinity with Crabbe. Both writers are described by Helen Lange, for instance, as having "rural life deep in their souls and memories" (37). But what strikes Howe here is Hardy's remark that Crabbe goes further than Barnes "in questioning the justice of circumstance" — a tacit acknowledgement of "the extent of his [Hardy's] own enlargement upon Barnes" (Howe 9).
That Hardy had started to question the "justice of circumstance" right from his childhood is fairly obvious to anyone who has read his biographies. And it was this questioning tendency in him that took him, in the first place, to contemporary thought, in the hope that the philosophical writers would help him to understand the world better. While preparing for a career in architecture, he was reading in private, often at the encouragement of his Cambridge-educated friend Horace Moule, not only ancient classical literature in Greek and Latin but also unorthodox and controversial philosophical and religious books and pamphlets. His readings greatly influenced his religious views. He had a thoroughly Christian upbringing, and indeed at one time had thought of taking religious orders. But as he developed, his life's experiences made it difficult for him to maintain these views. Polemical essays, written by dissident churchmen, and collected under the heading Essays and Reviews, and Darwin's Origin of Species, convinced Hardy that he could not give his intellectual assent to the doctrines of Christianity.
Instead, he formulated his own ideas about the Immanent Will or the Emergent Consciousness, and was aided in this by his understanding of contemporary philosophy. He felt more in sympathy with the philosophical ideas of Spencer, Huxley, Mill, Schopenhauer and von Hartmann than with the comparatively "optimistic" views of Maeterlinck and Nietzsche, both of whom he criticised in his letters and note-books. Throughout his life he pondered over such ideas and we find him explaining, as late as in his eighty-first year, his "sober opinion" to Alfred Noyes:
... my sober opinion — in so far as I have a definite one — of the Cause of Things, has been defined in scores of places, and is that of a great many ordinary thinkers: that the said Cause is neither moral nor immoral, but unmoral: "loveless and hateless" I have called it, "which neither good nor evil knows" etc. etc. ... you will find plenty of these definitions in The Dynasts as well as in short poems, and I am surprised that you have not taken them in. [qtd. in Hardy 439]
But it is important to note that though Hardy formulated his own "philosophy" (in the manner quoted above) on different occasions and in various ways, he did not ask to be judged as a philosopher. His interest in philosophical ideas was that of a poet. That is to say, though he was greatly excited by new philosophical thinking, he was equally determined to see whether it was consistent with his own human experience, and when they came in conflict, human experience won hands down. In fact, after his initial enthusiasm for the new philosophers, Hardy soon discovered that he himself had little in common with their theoretical stance or their methods or modes.
Especially, when he turned to writing poetry, he felt that one must develop one's own ideas about life on the basis of one's own experiences rather than on the formulations of philosophers. He noted in his journal on the last day of 1901:
After reading various philosophic systems, and being struck wae their contradictions and futilities, I have come to this:— Let every man make a philosophy for himself out of his own experience [Hardy's own italics]. He will not be able to escape using terms a phraseology from earlier philosophers, but let him avoid adopting their theories if he values his own mental life. Let him remember the fate of Coleridge, and save years of labour by working out his own views as given by his surroundings. [qtd. in Hardy 333]
I do not think that this amounts to a rejection of the philosophical ideas; but it meant a turning away from the methods the philosophers use for arriving at those or similar conclusions. Hardy indeed owed a great deal to contemporary philosophers like Huxley, Spencer and Mill, and may have come to believe that "if a way to the Better there be, it exacts a look at the Worst" from the examples of the philosophers who looked unflinchingly at the uncomfortable and harsh realities of the world. But, as I have already indicated, he was not deflected from his central poetic interest: an emotional and human response to the world as he and the philosophers saw it, and to man's place in it.
Poetry was therefore the ideal medium for him. His genius was essentially poetic in so far as he was interested in the personal and emotional, rather than rational, reaction to life. In fact, he was distrustful of a rational approach to life, and he wanted to be considered an "irrationalist," for which very reason he did not allow himself to be included in the Biographical Dictionary of Modern Rationalists: in reply to such a request, he asked his wife to write:
He [Hardy] says he thinks he is rather an irrationalist, on account of his inconsistencies. He has, in fact, declared as much in prefaces to some of his poems, where he explains his views as being mere impressions that frequently change. Moreover, he thinks he could show that no man is a rationalist ... [Hardy 432]
Elsewhere Florence Hardy had noted that her husband "was always a person with an unconscious, or rather unreasoning, tendency, and the poetic tendency had been his from the earliest" (Hardy 415). Hardy therefore decided that the emotional approach that poetry offered, indeed demanded, was the best means of exploring the human condition. He felt that in their attempt to present a rational, coherent, systematic view of life, philosophers had only partially succeeded in such an exloration, which could be carried out better by noting the "impressions" that life made on a sensitive mind. By adopting the "poetic" method, Hardy succeeded in projecting a comprehensive philosophy of human experience which not only showed that pain and suffering were built into the very fabric of human existence but also that an acceptance of this would lead man to cultivate positive qualities of endurance, patience and compassion.
One can see that, according to this [Hardy's] way of thinking, the poet's own personality played a crucial role. However, Hardy had decided from the very start that personal experiences and impressions were to be used, not for self- revelation, but for investigating the nature of human existence. He said: "My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thoughts of his own" (qtd. in Hardy 417). In many ways, he was, therefore, a deeply personal poet, but at the same time, he was, as an individual, an impenetrably reticent man. These contradictory elements in his personality were perfectly natural, in fact necessary, for the kind of poetry he wrote. For instance, he saw potentialities for human life through several of his own experiences and was able to transmute them in order to make poetic statements about life. And it is remarkable that though he was struck by the sadness, the sorrow and the regret in life, his realisation that it was the common lot of the whole of mankind strengthened him to face life with courage and compassion. Thus it was that he was able to write poetry that was, to use Thom Gunn's words of appreciation, "almost always robust, never fretful or neurotic. He particularly records his own losses as important only because they are a part of other people's losses" (34).
Hardy could achieve such results because he transmuted his philosophic interests in such a way that he was able to "make a philosophy for himself out of his experience" (qtd. in Hardy 333). In almost all his poems of personal experience he went back to his past and recalled buried emotions which, when filtered through his present poetic consciousness, acquired a certain timeless quality, suggesting that the past and the present interpenetrate, and that any attempt to see one to the exclusion the other is to distort the reality of human life. He was thus able to avoid not only the sentimentalism of nostalgia for the youthful joy and happiness of the past but also despair over the losses felt in the present. A recollection of the past as a living presence invested the present (despite all feelings of regret and frustration) with something positive. [1-8]
The Recognition of Hardy's Centrality as a Poet
"When we, if we live long enough, come to estimate the 'poetry of the period,' against Hardy's '600 pages' we will put what?" — Ezra Pound, p. 285
Despite this remarkable achievement, Hardy the poet, it is true, never commanded the recognition that Hardy the novelist enjoyed in the writer's lifetime. And subsequent to his death, and up and until the Second World War — when the modernists dominated the poetic landscape — Hardy's poetry remained largely relegated to the background. In his pioneering New Bearings in English Poetry, F.R. Leavis described Hardy as "a naive poet of simple attitudes and outlook" (47), and went on to explain that he belonged to an age that had become a part of history: "Hardy is now seen to be truly Victorian — a Victorian in his very pessimism, which implies positives and assurances that have vanished. He inhabits a solid world, with the earth firm under his feet. He knows what he wants, what he values, and what he is" (47). Leavis had made these remarks while he was trying to establish and promote the poetry of modernists like Pound and Eliot, and they were obviously meant to suggest that Hardy's "solidity" would seem to be "archaic" to the rootless inhabitants of the contemporary world of fragmented waste-land. Indeed, the leading poetic spokesman of this modern world, T.S. Eliot, found little to commend either in the personality of the poetic practices of a writer whom Henry James had condescendingly described as "good little Thomas Hardy":
The work of the late Thomas Hardy represents an interesting example of a powerful personality uncurbed by any institutional attachment or by submission to any objective beliefs; unhampered by any ideas, or even by what sometimes acts as a partial restraint upon inferior writers, the desire to please a large public. He seems to me to have written as nearly for the sake of "self-expression" as a man well can; and the self which he had to express does not strike me as a particularly wholesome or edifying matter of communication. [54]
Indeed, for the next several decades, Hardy the poet (like Hardy the novelist) was not regarded as a part of the modem literary scene, even though he happened to have written most of his poems in this century. At a time when the marked features of English literature were innovation, intellectual abstruseness and complexity, and experimental techniques of various kinds, Hardy "the old-fashioned Victorian" received few critical headlines. However, that is not to say that Hardy the poet ever went into complete oblivion. His poetry has shown itself to be consistently resilient, and this resilience springs primarily from its subject-matter. Simply put, one finds in Hardy what Dr Johnson famously commended in Gray's Elegy: "[it] abounds with images which find a mirror in every human mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo."
It is a measure of Ezra Pound's critical astuteness and objectivity that, while he himself was engaged in revolutionising English (and American) poetry, he was able to respond to the greatness of Hardy's poetry, very different though it was from his own and other modernist poems that were then being produced. Pound declared in his Guide to Kulchur that a "conscientious critic might be hard put to it to find just praise for Hardy's poems" (285). He himself tried to do so by pointing out that every serious, "collected" i.e. undistracted, reader would find in Hardy's poems echoes of his own human experiences:
No man can read Hardy's poems collected but that his own life, and forgotten moments of it, will come back to him, a flash here and an hour there. Have you a better test of true poetry?" (286)
And he went on to prophesy that Hardy's achievement would outlast those of other poets of his time: "When we, if we live long enough, come to estimate the 'poetry of the period,' against Hardy's '600 pages' we will put what?" (286).
Some forty years later, in 1969, Irving Howe came to confirm Pound's prognostication: "As we slowly emerge from the shadowing power of the age of modernism, Hardy's poems can be felt as more durable ... than those of, say, T.S. Eliot." And, like Pound, Howe finds the source of the durability in Hardy's poetry to lie in the simple fact that it reassures us that "this is how life is, has always been, and probably will always remain" (11). Thus it is that the "Victorian" Hardy, who had provided Leavis with just the background to the "new" poetry which he was expounding, has now come to the centre. In his book, significantly titled Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (1973), Donald Davie has claimed, albeit grudgingly, that "in the British poetry of the last fifty years (as not in American) the most far-reaching influence, for good and ill, has been not Yeats, still less Eliot or Pound, not Lawrence, but Hardy" (3). He has had enormous influence on the poets of the succeeding generations. It is generally agreed now that Hardy has become a kind of poets' poet of this century. Michael Millgate has noted how, while Hardy was still living, the best known poets of his day paid a joint tribute to the older poet:
That October [1919] Siegfried Sassoon came to Max Gate for the weekend, bringing with him the "Poet's Tribute," a handsomely bound volume in which forty-three poets — from Bridges, Kipling, and Yeats to Graves, Sassoon, and D. H. Lawrence — had each inscribed in Hardy's honour a copy of one of his own poems. [528]
More recently, Philip Larkin has pointed to Hardy's central place in modern English poetry by giving him the largest number of poems in his Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (Yeats had included only four in his Oxford book in 1936). Subsequently he provided a list of English poets who, however different in their own poetic practices, were one in their admiration of Hardy the poet:
I think most poets who are well-known today have loved Hardy's poems at one time or another. I think Auden has; I think Dylan Thomas did. Vernon Watkins told me that although Dylan Thomas thought Yeats was the greatest modern poet, Hardy was the one he loved. Betjeman clearly loves him, the Poet Laureate, Cecil Day Lewis, clearly does; and yet they are all very dissimilar poets. I rather think that they may have found what I found, that Hardy gave them the confidence to feel in their own way. [175]
Hardy, whose modest poetic ambition had been to "have some poem or poems in a good anthology like the Golden Treasury." (Millgate 568), would surely have been surprised as well as pleased to receive such an accolade. [14-17]
Links to Related Material
Bibliography
[Source] "Introduction." An Historical Evaluation of Thomas Hardy's Poetry. Ed. A. Banerjee, with a preface by Robert Fraser. Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000. 1-18.
Davie, Donald. Thomas Hardy and British Poetry. London: Routledge, 1973.
Eliot, T.S. After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern History. London: Faber, 1934.
Gunn, Thom. "Hardy and the Ballads." Agenda (Spring-Summer 1972): 19-46.
Hardy, Florence. The Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840-1928. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985.
Howe, Irving. "Hardy the Obscure." The New York Times Book Review (7 May 1978). 11, 44.
_____. Thomas Hardy. 1966. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1985.
Lange, Helen. "Thomas Hardy and George Crabbe: The Native Environment Calls." The Hardy Society Journal 7, no. 2 (2011): 34–50. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48563675.
Larkin, Philip. Required Writing. London: Faber, 1983.
Leavis, F R. New Bearings in English Poetry: A Study of the Contemporary Situation. Rev. ed. Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1972.
Millgate, Michael. Thomas Hardy: A Biography. London: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Pound, Ezra. Guide to Kulchur. New York: New Directions, 1968.
Created 28 July 2024