Thomas Hardy Modernist Poet

THOMAS HARDY MODERNIST POET

By MARY ANN GILLIES

In 1972 Donald Davie claimed that “in 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.”’ This seems a straightforward challenge to the boundaries of British modernist poetry which were drawn earlier in this century and which have to a large extent consigned Hardy to the periphery.* Davie’s claim not only asserts Hardy’s preeminent place in modernist British poetry, but also questions the way that we define this historical movement. The tell-tale phrase is buried in parentheses-“(as not in American) ”-yet the subtext of Davie’s remark might be expressed as follows: when we consider the genuinely English poetry of the modernist period, Hardy emerges as the central figure. Philip Larkin suggests such an argument when he says that there might be

an English tradition coming from the nineteenth century with people like Hardy, which was interrupted partly by the Great

Donald Davie, Thomas Hardy and Bn’tish Poet9 (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 3.

* There is much ongoing debate concerning the meaning of the terms modern, modernity, and modernism. I take modernism to have historical and critical or theo- retical components. In Anglo-American criticism the term generally refers to the period between 1880 and 1940; this will be used here. The critical component is harder to establish. Following the lead of Matei Calinescu (Five Faces of Modernity, rev.

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War, when many English poets were killed off, and partly by the really tremendous impact of Yeats, whom I think of as Celtic, and Eliot, whom I think of as American.’

This argument has not been developed elsewhere at any length, although Samuel Hynes’s “The Hardy Tradition in English Po- etry’’ suggests that Hardy is both an important modern writer and one who illustrates “that much modern poetry is traditional and continuous with the past, and that the apocalyptic uniqueness of modern experience has been e~aggerated.”~ By claiming that Hardy is not only a central figure in British modernist poetry, but that he is also the progenitor of a distinctly English strand of it, we cast a very different light on debates about the period.

Until recently, most studies of the period relegated Hardy’s poetry to the periphery, concentrating on the work of Eliot and Yeats and frequently on Pound.5 Even as perceptive a critic as

ed. [Durham: Duke University Press, 1987]), Paul de Man (“Lyric and Modernity,” Blindness and Insight [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 19831, pp. 166-86), Perry Meisel (The Myth of the Modern [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987]), and others, I distinguish between modern, modernity, and modernism. Modern represents any emerging generation’s battle against the practices or beliefs of an older, established tradition. All periods are subject to such battles, but what distinguishes period from period is the nature of the battle. Modernity refers to literature as a whole and describes the dialectic in which all literature is constantly interacting with new literature; as de Man says, modernity “occurs as a continuous historical movement” in which “the son understands the father and takes his work a step further, becoming in turn the father, the source of future offspring” (p. 183). Here the emphasis is on the continuity of tradition and the fact that each new generation of moderns absorbs its fathers’ traditions, transforms them, and then becomes the tradition itself. Modern- ism, finally, has particular battles, and those who call themselves “modern” are re- sponsible for the main descriptions of the period. Their assertions of independence and originality have subsequently been adopted by later writers, critics, and scholars as parameters which define the historical period. Modernism illustrates de Man’s literary paradigm, since despite the protestations of the young, we can readily see how modernism evolves out of previous literary traditions including both Romanticism and Victorianism. So the term modernism, by encompassing both modern and modernity as well as having a generally agreed-upon historical sense, provides an adequate, though by no means a final or comprehensive, label for this period. Throughout this paper, modernist will refer to those writers who were actively involved on the “modern” side of the battle line and who questioned the traditions and practices of their literary forefathers.

Quoted in Blake Morrison, The Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 203.

Samuel Hynes, “The Hardy Tradition in English Poetry” (Thomas Hardy: The Writer and his Background, ed. Norman Page [London: Bell and Hyman, 19801, pp. 173-91). p. 175. Subsequent references to this edition are identified as Hynes.

Hardy’s poetry began to attract wider critical attention after the Southern Review’s Centenary Issue in 1940. But the most productive period for studies of Hardy’s poetry began in the late 1970s and the 1980s. James Richardson’s Thomas Hardy: The Poet? of Necessity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), Tom Paulin’s Thomas Hardy: The

MARY ANN GILLIES 537

Carol Christ has fallen victim to this drawing of modernist boundaries. When she says in her introduction to Victorian and Modern Poetics that she has “not chosen to treat the poetry of any number of minor figures important in the history of the relationship and transition of nineteenth- to twentieth-century poetry- Hardy, Houseman, E. A. Robinson, the poets of the nineties, to name just a few’’ because her study “is not a history of the many complicated strands connecting the two centuries but is an argument about a way of constructing poetics that unites some of the major figures from those centuries,” she accepts the definition of modernist poetry advanced by Eliot and Pound.6 However, she is in good company. Many of this century’s most eminent critics have found themselves agreeing with T. S. Eliot’s assess- ment of Hardy’s writing:

The work of the late Thomas Hardy represents an interesting example of a powerful personality uncurbed by any institu- tional 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 was indifferent even to the precepts of good writing: he wrote sometimes overpoweringly well, but always very carelessly; at times his style touches sublimity, without ever having passed through the stage of being good.’

Eliot’s attack is paradigmatic of the critical treatment often meted out to Hardy even today.

Clearly the question that needs to be asked here is why? Why is Hardy, who is widely read and well regarded by poets and the general public alike, not often considered by critics as a central part of British modernist poetry? This paper proposes two

Poetry of Perception (London: Macmillan, 1975), and Dennis Taylor’s recent Hardy 3 Metrics and Victorian Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) are excellent assessments of Hardy’s poetic achievements and his place in literary history.

Carol T. Christ, Victorian and Modern Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 14. Subsequent references to this edition are identified as Christ.

’T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), pp. 54-55. Al- though Eliot makes these remarks while discussing Hardy’s prose, I believe they apply equally to his poetry. Hardy’s verse was less subject to public restraints-both because he was financially secure and because he did not feel a need to please literary critics. These factors more clearly allow his powerful personality an outlet for expression. There is nothing in the other, few comments Eliot makes about Hardy, which are scattered throughout his critical writings, that leads me to believe that his views on Hardy’s poetry were any different from those on his prose.

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explanations for Hardy’s marginal position. The first focuses on how we customarily define the period and then examines how this definition marginalizes Hardy. The second draws upon Larkin’s comment-that Hardy is excluded precisely because he provides an English orientation for modernist poetry which was alien to the more forceful figures of the period who were not English. Yeats was Irish, Eliot and Pound American, and their domination of British modernism resulted in the squeezing aside of an indig- enously English tradition which found its spokesman in Hardy. Many of the English poets who succeeded Hardy bear the imprint of his influence-for, as W. H. Auden said, “the properties of Hardy’s world were the properties of my own childhood”8-and the tradition in which he worked was the English poetic tradition to which Auden as well as Larkin, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Ted Hughes amongst others gained entry partly through Hardy’s verse.

T. S. Eliot is a pervasive figure in British modernist poetry. Most critical studies inevitably deal with his proclamations because he appropriated for himself the task of articulating his generation’s view of what constituted literature, and poetry in particular. I, too, will start with Eliot because his views represent the customary definition of the period. In “The Metaphysical Po- ets’’ he presents a characteristic description of modernist poetry:

Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difJi- cult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.g

Poetry that captures the very complexity of society in the throes of great change must embody that society by itself being complex and difficult. The more allusive, the more difficult, the more nearly impenetrable to all but a few of the initiated the better, for this means that the poetry adequately captures the essence of the

W. H. Auden, “A Literary Transference,“ (Southem Review, 6 [1940-411: 76-86), p.

T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets” (Selected ESSQJS [London: Faber and Faber, 81. Subsequent references to this essay are identified as Auden.

19763, pp. 281-91), p. 289.


chaotic age. But such a definition omits far more than it admits and in so doing it renders itself incapable of being an accurate or even adequate definer of modernist poetry. Not all modernists sought their subject matter in the modern city; some of Yeats’s finest lyrics, for instance, are grounded in the Irish countryside of the past. Nor are modernists difficult or comprehensive: Auden’s early lyrics are often breathtakingly simple in conception and execution. Nor, finally, do modernists always layer their poems with difficult or obscure allusions; some of Dylan Thomas’s or Yeats’s, or Lawrence’s poetry as well as the work of the Imagistes are considered successful modernist works without building an elaborate schema of allusions. So Eliot’s description of modernist poetry is not as broadly applicable as he, and subsequent critics, would have us believe. And this is the crux of the matter.

Eliot performed the dual role of critic and artist and in doing so articulated criteria which justify the type of poetry he wrote. Despite Eliot’s pretense of objectivity, his assessments of other poets are an elaboration of his own artistic predilections. Con- temporary criticism is aware of the pervasiveness of taste and subjectivity in critical activity, and it is even more conscious of this when considering comments by artists on their art or field of art. Until recently, though, we seem to have pushed this awareness aside and we have allowed Eliot to dictate the terms by which we measure modernist literature. As a result, we place one of the most widely read poets-Hardy-at the margins. In fact, Hardy shared many of the same concerns as Eliot, though his articula- tion of them differed.

Difficult, complex, allusive. These are three of the leading criteria for modernist poetry which Eliot established. I have no funda- mental quarrel with abstracting these qualities as representative of what made this period’s literature distinct. However, I will argue that we should broaden the scope of these terms, admitting verse that is difficult or complex or allusive in ways that Eliot would not necessarily have condoned. Hardy’s verse embodies all of the things Eliot demanded of modernist poetry. It is technically difficult: he does “dislocate if necessary” the structure of verse in order for it to convey his vision. It is complex, and not only in technical matters such as verse structure or meter. It is allusive, but Hardy’s allusions are not Continental, Celtic or American;

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they remain thoroughly English. That Eliot and others ignored or belittled such a tradition should not surprise us when we recall Pound’s remark, “All the developments in English verse since 1910 are due almost wholly to Americans. In fact, there is no longer any reason to call it English verse, and there is no present reason to think of England at all” (Christ, p. 152). But Hardy’s poems do capture the ethos of the era. Though they do not explore the jarring world of the city popularized by Continental poets and Eliot, they show that the familiar landscape of the English countryside was equally and profoundly affected by the doubt and changes of the new century.

Reviewers and critics of Hardy’s poetry have often cited its prosody as proof of Hardy’s poetic shortcomings. A reviewer of Wessex Poems, for example, wrote in the Saturday Review (1899) that “as we read this curious and wearisome volume, these many slovenly, slipshod, uncouth verses, stilted in sentiment, poorly conceived and worse wrought, our respect [for Hardy] lessens to a vanishing-point, and we lay it down with the feeling strong upon us that Mr. Hardy has, by his own deliberate act, discredited that judgment and presentation of life on which his reputation rested.”*O The belief that Hardy was “too self-conscious, too deliberately rhetorical, too monotonously disenchanted” ( Casebook, p. 46) was adopted by many subsequent critics; when F. R. Leavis commented, “If one says that he seems to have no sensitiveness for words, one recognizes at the same time that he has made a style out of style- lessness,” he was echoing one standard perception of Hardy’s verse.” Critics of Leavis’s school of thought assumed that Hardy’s many metric and stanzaic variations were products of an unskilled hand and were accidental or ill-conceived attempts at novelty for the sake of novelty. Furthermore, they contended that the great variety of forms were often ill-suited to the sentiments being expressed. However, some early critics, notably Edward Thomas, Harold Child, and J. M. Murry, appreciated “his power over meter and rhyme, and his command of that intensity of measured utter- ance which, in the end, makes the difference between poetry and

lo James Gibson and Trevor Johnson, eds., Thomas Hardy: Poems, Casebook Series (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 41. Subsequent references to this edition are identified as Casebook.

l 1 F. R. Leavis, “Hardy the Poet,” (Southern Review, 6 [1940-411: 87-98), p. 88.


prose” (Casebook, p. 75). They credited Hardy with the technical skill which he himself states is at the heart of his approach to verse. He wrote that critics failed to see that his intricate stanzaic forms and metrical variations were deliberate and were intended to complement the ideas he was exploring. Hardy’s structural experimentations were a conscious response to the same forces which were pushing Eliot, Yeats, the Imagistes and others into their own experiments. Hardy differs from them by moving not in the direction of greater freedom, but towards a greater elaboration and variation of existing metrical and stanzaic forms. In other words, he carries out the modernist program of “making it new” by undertaking the difficult task of transforming and adapting the existing tradition. This results in poetry which is technically difficult; it provides an alternative to the free verse modernist poetry which dominates the period and thus provides models for the next generation of English poets.

Elizabeth Hickson’s The Versijication of Thomas Hardy (1931) de- tailed the variety and vast scope of his metrical achievements, thereby also establishing the weight and importance of Hardy’s contributions to modernist poetics. It was left to Dennis Taylor’s recent Hardy’s Metres and Victorian Prosody (1988) to illustrate Hardy’s place in the broader tradition of English prosody. Taylor argues convincingly that Hardy was an ardent student of prosody and, as Taylor’s book amply demonstrates, he carried on a lifelong study of the intricacies of verse which he began in the 1860s. Taylor, who shows us just how deeply indebted Hardy is to not only the Victorian prosodists but to the larger tradition of English prosody, writes, “For Hardy, craft consisted not only in understanding the nature of his tools, as the Victorian prosodists understood them, but also in knowing the history of the use of those tools, and incorporating that history in his practice.”“ For Hardy, submer- sion in traditional English prosody was liberating. It gave him models to work with and standards to test and redesign or break. As Taylor reports, “For some 1,093 poems, Hardy used well over 790 different metrical forms,” and “Hardy invented more verse forms than any other poet in the accentual-syllabic tradition: well

’* Dennis Taylor, Hardy’s Metres and Victorian Prosody (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 206. Subsequent references to this edition are identified as Taylor.

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over 620 verse forms in which almost 600 of his poems are written” (Taylor, p. 71). That he was a prolific creator of new forms attests to his desire to stretch, “to dislocate if necessary,” traditional forms in order to make them expressive of his own vision. With respect to the Eliot criterion of creating poetry that was difficult, Hardy is clearly a modernist. But by choosing to ground his difficulty in the traditional realm of metrics and structure, Hardy offers a modernist poem which is thoroughly English and different from those being written by the other major modernist figures.

Hardy spent years suffering from the critics’ dismissal of his poems as intellectually lightweight, unmitigated accounts of a pessi- mistic and hostile world. Frustrated by their failure to understand that his poems were far more complex in vision than generally acknowledged, Hardy responded in his “Preface” to Late Lyrics and Earlier ( 1922) :

For-while I am quite aware that a thinker is not expected, and, indeed, is scarcely allowed, now more than heretofore, to state all that crosses his mind concerning existence in this universe, in his attempts to explain or excuse the presence of evil and the incongruity of penalizing the irresponsible-it must be obvious to open intelligences that, without denying the beauty and faithful service of certain venerable cults, such disallowance of ‘obstinate questionings’ and ‘blank misgiv- ings’ tends to a paralyzed intellectual talem mate.'^

“The business of the poet and novelist,” as Hardy elsewhere ex- plains, “is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things, and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.” He continues:

Perhaps I can express more fully in verse ideas and emotions which run counter to the inert crystallized opinion-hard as a 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 for centuries-will

l 3 Thomas Hardy, “Preface to Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922),” (Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings, ed. Harold Ore1 [Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 19661, pp. 50-58), p. 52. Subsequent references to this edition are identified as Personal Writings.


cause them merely a shake of the head; but to put i t in argu- mentative prose will make them sneer, or foam, and set all the literary contortionists jumping upon me, a harmless agnostic, as if I were a clamorous atheist, which in their crass illiteracy they seem to think is the same thing.

(Casebook, pp. 30-31)

Clearly he saw his task as two-fold: to challenge the ideas of his day with ones which he believed gave a more accurate picture of the world and to do this by employing verse effectively so that the challenges were not dismissed outright or greeted with great hos- tility. I will focus on how he dealt with two themes that stand at the heart of much modernist poetry: time and religion.

Time was a vexatious issue in the early years of this century. Bergson’s philosophy and Einstein’s physics made it difficult, if not impossible, to accept the view that time was anything other than an arbitrary, indifferent, natural force that relegated man to a position on par with other natural beings. In the vast cosmology of the universe any single moment was as important or unimpor- tant as any other. In one sense Hardy’s poetry amply illustrates this bleak diminution of human importance. In a poem such as “The Convergence of the Twain,” for example, the puny human efforts to bend the world to its will are satirized. Lines such as “No mortal eye could see” and “And query: ‘What does this vain- gloriousness down here?”’ mock human pretensions to govern not only nature but also human existence.14 Yet there is a strong countercurrent in his poetry which asserts that man may be able to circumvent the flow of time. He may do this in two distinct ways. First, as suggested in “The Convergence of the Twain,” his monuments may serve to tell others of his existence. Both materi- ally through her decaying physical wreck, which though a monu- ment to “human vanity” nevertheless serves as a reminder that exists beyond its assigned moment in time, and mythically, by entering into the stock of human stories which forms one part of a communal experience, the Titanic escapes the tyranny of time. In a like fashion, Hardy’s poetry also escapes the tyranny of time, which inevitably draws the poet to the grave. Thus the act of writing itself is a defiance of time the destroyer.

l4 The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. James Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1976), pp. 306-9. Subsequent references to this edition are identified as Complete Poems.

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An even clearer example of the two treatments of time is found in “The Oxen.” This poem begins by presenting the traditional Christmas scene, but the past tense verbs-“said,” “sat,” “pictured” (Complete Poems, p. 468), and so on-convey a sense of a time already gone. This is explicit in the seventh and eighth lines of the poem: “Nor did it occur to one of us there / To doubt they were kneeling then.” The countercurrent introduced in the next two lines-“So fair a fancy few would weave / In these years!”- presents the speaker’s nostalgia for a time he can no longer inhabit. Here Hardy uses memory to link physical time, which is gone forever, and experiential time-those memories which re- side within each individual. Individuals can battle time’s con- tinual onslaught by employing memory to renew and revive past experiences. The poem concludes:

If someone said on Christmas Eve, ‘Come; see the oxen kneel

‘In the lonely barton by yonder coomb Our childhood used to know,’

I should go with him in the gloom, Hoping it might be so.

The “hoping” permits a sense that the childhood belief in transcendent time might be borne out as well as allowing for the adult skepticism about transcendent things. In this poem, then, Hardy presents a characteristically modernist solution to the problem of time: we may never be able to relive any moment, but with our memory of it we may recapture it in some manner. Clearly, Hardy’s treatment of time in both of these poems is anything but simple. In each, as in many other poems, the struggle between perma- nence and impermanence is dealt with and no real solution of- fered. Instead, Hardy challenges his readers by showing us the “underlying” aspect of the question at hand.

In the same “Preface” to Late Lyrics and Earlier Hardy also writes that “poetry and religion touch each other, or rather modulate into each other; are, indeed, often but different names for the same thing” (Personal Writings, p. 5 6 ) . Samuel Hynes picks up on this point and comments, “This can only be true if religion is


defined as a feeling rather than as a body of doctrine, and that is the way in which Hardy defined his own religiousness; he was, he wrote, ‘churchy; not in an intellectual sense, but in so far as instincts and emotions ruled’“ (Hynes, p. 184). Hardy’s poetry is religious in the sense that he struggles with the questions which permeate most creeds-questions which deal with the need to understand one’s place in the world, to find some meaning in the seemingly random and chaotic events that occur, to find some meaning in individual existence, and for Hardy the most important question, to find some meaning in death. Rooted in the skeptical late Victorian world, he is intellectually unable to accept the comfort of belief proffered by organized religions; therefore, some critics have seen his refusal to accept their religious views as proof of Hardy’s atheism. Yet Hardy referred to himself as an “agnostic” and his idea of an “Immanent Will” is well known, though poorly understood. Hardy did believe that a force lies behind the actions of the world but he refused to anthropomor- phize it. Neither the alternately indulgent or stern parental figure of Christianity, nor even the many faces of God constructed by other religions, Hardy’s force is as indifferent to humans as it is to every other thing on the earth. Yet emotionally, he cannot let go of the need for some greater power. In this struggle between intellect and emotion he is typically modernist. One need only think of the elaborate cosmologies drawn by Yeats or Pound to see how they too construct a force behind the scenes. Certainly Eliot’s poetry is permeated by religious anxiety. It is by portraying this struggle between mind and heart-intellect and emotions- that Hardy enacts his own modernist search for meaning. Two excellent examples of this are found in “After a Journey” and “The Darkling Thrush. ”

“After a Journey” is a beautiful elegy in which the speaker con- fronts the “voiceless ghost” of his lost love (Complete Poems, p. 349). Balancing the religious or spiritual element with the world’s physical realities enables Hardy to play out the dilemma between belief and skepticism. A line such as the fifth one in the opening stanza-“Where you will next be there’s no knowing”-balances both impulses. The “you” is a tangible presence; physically the lover may no longer exist, but mere physical existence is not the total measure of an individual’s being. Existence in memory or

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even in imagination is as real to the speaker as physical presence. The whole poem is constructed so that we wonder if the speaker simply addresses his words to the absent “voiceless ghost” or if he sees the “thin ghost” of his beloved while he wanders “the spots we knew when we haunted here together.” So strong is the speaker’s sense of his beloved, that it does not matter whether she lives in the world or in memory. Yet the phrase “there’s no knowing” conveys the speaker’s awareness that his beloved is beyond his reach; he may hope that he will encounter her in her “olden haunts,” but he has no way of ensuring that this will happen. The final stanza nicely juxtaposes the two impulses:

Ignorant of what there is flitting here to see,

Soon you will have, Dear, to vanish from me,

whitens hazily. Trust me, I mind not, though Life lours,

The bringing me here; nay, bring me here again! I am just the same as when Our days were a joy, and our paths through flowers.

The waked birds preen and the seals flop lazily;

For the stars close their shutters and the dawn

The particularized descriptions of the natural se tting-the “birds” preening and “seals” flopping, the “stars” closing their “shutters” and “dawn” whitening-vividly convey the speaker’s existence in the actual physical world. They suggest that his whole conversa- tion with his beloved has been at night and that it is nothing more than a dream from which he now awakens. Yet the assertion that “I am just the same as when / Our days were a joy, and our paths through flowers“ balances the previous suggestion by claiming that the speaker is every bit as awake now as he was during their time together. The extended metaphors here-the dream and the daytime-demonstrate the careful balance of the themes of belief and skepticism central to the poem.

“The Darkling Thrush” presents a much more sharply delin- eated contrast between physical reality and spiritual belief. The poem’s landscape is harsh and unforgiving: “Frost was spectre- gray” and “Winter’s dregs made desolate / The weakening eye of day” (Complete Poems, p. 150). The speaker’s mood for the first three stanzas is equally bleak, for he stands observing the land-


scape and thinking that “every spirit upon earth / Seemed fervourless as I.” Yet the “carolings / Of such ecstatic sound” from “An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small” provoke a profound response in the speaker. He says:

That I could think there trembled through

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew His happy good-night air

And I was unaware.

Belief in transcendence and physical reality are again juxtaposed here. The first three stanzas conspire to link speaker and reader in a search for transcendence, but the lines also quietly under- mine this hope. The adjective “spectre-gray” in the second line introduces a hint of the supernatural or spiritual. The expression “All mankind that haunted nigh” then puts all other humans in the same spectral world as the frost and presumably the whole landscape. So in the first stanza the speaker is effectively isolated from the landscape and its inhabitants not because he inhabits a spiritual realm, but because they do. If the speaker could join this world, it would end his isolation. Hardy begins to draw the speaker back into the world in the final two lines of the second stanza: “And every spirit upon earth / Seemed fervourless as I.” The speaker’s sense that he shares a feeling of isolation- “fervour1essness”-with all others brings him closer to them, but by referring to them as “spirits” Hardy also moves the speaker closer to the non-substantial world from which he seemed to have been isolated. The final two stanzas, with the thrush’s song, con- tinue the intricate dance between the physical and spiritual cul- minating in the frozen moment at the poem’s end where the speaker wants to believe that there is something beyond the physical- “Some blessed Hope”-but finds himself unable to believe without proof-‘‘I was unaware.” The final word carries a heavy weight because it embodies the need for physical proof-“unaware” con- noting knowledge and thus implying the kind of physical evidence that faith or belief cannot provide to the questioning intellect. Again, this poem shows a very complex treatment of the central issues of religion. Hardy employs the romantic image of a song- bird, thereby linking this poem with English tradition. But by

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using the image in a modernistic way-not only to explore the gulf between belief and knowledge, but also to affirm the impossibility of reconciling the two or closing the gulf-he transforms the tradition and claims it as his own.

The third criterion, that modernist poetry be allusive, may be, at first glance, the one which most justifies Hardy’s place on the margins. He does not partake in the modernist practice of crest- ing an international literature; his poems rarely refer to continental poetry or places and he uses classical allusions more sparingly than other modernists. But this does not mean that his poems are not allusive; on the contrary, Hardy simply opts for a different framework for his allusions. That he does this consciously is made clear in the “General Preface to the Novels and Poems” of the Wessex Edition of 19 12:

I would state that the geographical limits of the stage here trodden were not absolutely forced upon the writer by circumstances; he forced them upon himself from judgment. I considered that our magnificent heritage from the Greeks in dramatic literature found sufficient room for a large propor- tion of its action in an extent of their country not much larger than the half-dozen counties here reunited under the old name of Wessex, that the domestic emotions have throbbed in Wessex nooks with as much intensity as in the palaces of Europe, and that, anyhow, there was quite enough human nature in Wessex for one man’s literary purpose. So far was I possessed by this idea that I kept within the frontiers when it would have been easier to overleap them and give more cos- mopolitan features to the narrative. (Personal Writings, p. 45)

Hardy employs three distinctive sorts of allusions to his own local setting: language, landscape, and voice.

Hardy’s language illustrates that famous Wordsworthian dictum that “the language of a large portion of every good poem, even of the most elevated character, must necessarily, except with refer- ence to the metre, in no respect differ from that of good prose” and that it is the “language really used by men.”15 Hardy resorts to the dialect of the West Country and to pre-Norman words. His poems employ words such as “bine-stems” (“The Darkling Thrush”),


“barton” and “coomb” (“The Oxen”), and a myriad of other West Country locutions to describe the physical setting of his world. He persists in using archaic personal pronouns -“thy,” “thou” and so on-as this was the custom of his locale. And he revives Anglo-Saxon words and word order in order to underscore his commitment to his poetic heritage. Auden said of Hardy’s language that it “taught me much about direct colloquial diction, all the more because his directness was in phrasing and syntax” (Auden, p. 85). The influence Hardy still exercises over English poetry is related to the fact that, as Auden says, “Here was a ‘modern’ rhetoric which was more fertile and adaptable to different themes than any of Eliot’s gas-works and rats’ feets which one could steal but never make one’s own” (Auden, p. 86).

Hardy’s allusions to his landscape-both the physical land and its people-are another important feature of his poetry. We saw above how Hardy made the conscious choice to restrict his scope to the “half dozen counties here reunited under the old name of Wessex.” His poetry, then, has an immediate impact on an En- glish audience familiar with the landscape he is writing about and also familiar with the long line of English poets who wrote of their own specific locales. But just as he transforms the metrical tradition in which he worked, so he transforms the landscape tradition. He does this in two ways. First, his descriptions are concrete and particular. In “A Death-Day Recalled,” for example, the names in the first stanza set the physical location firmly in the reader’s mind:

Beeny did not quiver, Juliot grew not gray,

Thin Vallency’s river Held its wonted way.

Bos seemed not to utter Dimmest note of dirge,

Targan mouth a mutter To its creamy surge.

(Complete Poems, p. 350)

’’ William Wordsworth, “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,” (English Romantic Writers, ed. David Perkins [New York: Harvard University Press, 19671, pp. 320-31), pp. 323, 321.

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In “Near Lanivet, 1872,” the lovers’ world is vividly recreated in lines such as “There was a stunted handpost just on the crest” or “In the west cloud’s murked obscure” (Complete Poems, p. 436). Hardy’s land functions in a literal sense; he does not imbue it with some mysterious transcendent power or spirit. The human wanderer converts the land into something more than it is; whether he does this out of a need to find comfort in a transformed scene or because he is influenced by previous encounters with a particular scene that transforms the current one, the land itself is not magical or mysterious as it is in other poets’ landscapes. For example, in “In Front of the Landscape” the speaker is walking in familiar terrain-“the customed landscape”-which is “Blotted to feeble mist” because of fog (Complete Poems, pp. 304-5). The fog is both literal-the land is shrouded in mist-and figural-the speaker’s consciousness is focused on the past with its “scenes” “miscalled of the bygone” days. The fact that the landscape is at once familiar and obscure suggests that its function in the poem is to provide a backdrop to his memories, but it also ties him to his own reality. The landscape reminds him of the past, and when it is obscured he can believe that he is in the past. Yet to place himself in the past world means that he sees “nought / Round him” and that he is separated from the land.

The second way Hardy transforms the physical is through his “bird’s eye” descriptive method. By creating a distance between the locale being described and the voice describing it, Hardy infuses a sense of the changed relationship between the land and its inhabitants. Implicit here is the modernist belief that humans are alienated from their roots, their traditions, and thus cannot interact with them as their ancestors did. Hardy recreates this alienation by presenting an uneasy distance between humans and the land. Often he casts the speaker in the role of one reminisc- ing about a familiar landscape that is now less known, or even forgotten. In “The Place on the Map,” for instance, he creates a double distance from the land. The poem’s first line, “I look upon the map that hangs by me,” indicates that the speaker is not even in the landscape he is contemplating; he is looking at the map which depicts, or recreates, it (Complete Poems, pp. 321-22). The opening line of the second stanza-”’Twas a day of latter summer, hot and dry”-suggests that the speaker is recreating a


moment from his past which he remembers because of the sight of the map. The first two lines of stanza three confirm this: “This hanging map depicts the coast and place, / And re-creates there- with our unforeboded troublous case.” The immediate connection to nature is thus replaced by a connection twice removed: it is a past event and its location is indicated not by real land, but by a representation of it. This kind of distancing is characteristic of Hardy’s treatment of physical geography and creates a modernist gulf between the rural dwellers and the land they inhabit that is analogous to the nightmarish streets and city wanderers of other modernist verse.

Hardy also uses the characters he creates to intensify the PO- ems’ allusiveness. He says in the “Preface” to Wessex Poems (1898), “The pieces are in a large degree dramatic or personative in conception” (Personal Writings, p. 3 8 ) . Later, in the “Preface” to Poems of the Past and Present (1920), he reiterates and expands upon this point:

the subject-matter of this volume . . . is dramatic or impersonative even when not explicitly so. And that portion which may be regarded as individual comprises a series of feelings and fan- cies written down in widely differing moods and circumstances, and at various dates. . . . I do not greatly regret this. Unad- justed impressions have their value, and the road to a true philosophy of life seems to lie in humbly recording diverse readings of its phenomena as they are forced upon us by chance and change. (Personal Writings, pp. 38-39)

We need only think of the speakers in two of the poems we have already glanced at-“The Darkling Thrush” and “The Oxen”-to get a sense of the characters Hardy presents in his poems. Each speaker undergoes a moment of profound spiritual doubt, and each one’s dilemma is made accessible because the character is, for a brief moment, open to us. We enter his consciousness, feel his pain at his doubts, his longings for solutions, his acceptance of the impossibility of a solution-and then we leave him. Hardy did not need to look beyond his “six Counties” because he judged correctly that they contained the same types of people with the same types of problems as are found elsewhere.

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Hardy creates the third layer of allusions with his immediately recognizable voice. The voice results from the combination of his distinctive language, structure, subjects, and figures; it also de- pends on a pervasive, yet curiously detached self-consciousness that is essentially modernistic. J. Hillis Miller has well described it:

Nowhere in Hardy’s writings is there a description of an origi- nating act in which the mind separates itself from everything but itself. His self-awareness and that of his characters are always inextricably involved in their awareness of the world. . . . A man, in [Hardy’s] view, should even look at his own interior life as something detached and external, not as something known from the inside with special intimacy.I6

Yet, as Miller and others point out, the world of which Hardy writes is his own; his inner life, experiences, and observations form the core of his poetry. The juxtaposition of highly personal subjects with the equally impersonal examination of them creates this characteristic gentle, self-mocking tone that becomes Hardy’s poetic signature. It is as if a weary, worldly-wise man passes on his experience to an audience which is disposed to love him despite, or perhaps because of, his willingness to reveal his own flaws and foibles and observations about the world he inhabits. It is a com- fortable voice tinged with a certain jaundiced view of human nature and the world. See, it seems to say, see what I have done, see what is happening in the world, see and learn from it, become wiser. More than the other modernists, with whom he shares this curious blend of personal and impersonal participation in his own poetry, Hardy’s voice invites the reader to listen to the poem’s arguments, to recreate its scenes, and to believe in them after- wards. Eliot’s Madame Sosostris or Tiresias might fascinate the reader, but Hardy’s speakers, whether leaning on a coppice gate contemplating the future or walking on the cliff tops remember- ing a beloved who is now dead, become part of the reader’s world. That invitation for the reader to join in the poetry is the most significant difference between Hardy’s modernism and that of Eliot, Pound or even Yeats. Eliot’s frankly elitist poetry rests on an equally elitist belief that the majority of society cannot appre-

l 6 J. Hillis Miller, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 1.


hend the changes in society. Eliot wrote his poetry for the few capable of understanding and thus of seeing how the poems dealt with the change. Hardy’s poems, in contrast, include the reader in the process of exploring the changing world. Hardy’s reader is aware and part of these changes.

Perhaps Auden best summarizes Hardy’s vision:

To see the individual life related not only to the local social life of its time, but to the whole of human history, life on earth, the stars, gives one both humility and self-confidence. For from such a perspective the difference between the individual and society is so slight, since both are so insignificant, that the latter ceases to appear as a formidable god with abso- lute rights, but rather as an equal, subject to the same laws of growth and decay, and therefore one with whom reconcilia- tion is possible. (Auden, p. 82)

Hardy did not need to discover or invent a new tradition, nor did he need to hide his anxieties about the nature of the world or individual existence behind veils of obscurity. He deliberately chose to accept his poetic and social heritage, but he was not a slave to that tradition. Echoing Matthew Arnold, Hardy asked himself “Should a shaper of such stuff as dreams are made on disregard considerations of what is customary and expected, and apply himself to the real function of poetry, the application of ideas to life?” (Late Lyrics, pp. 53-54). He answers with a resound- ing yes. He lived in the turbulent early years of this century; he echoes ideas circulating at the time-doubts about religion’s abil- ity to explain the world, scientific theories that were challenging orthodox opinions, new philosophical and psychological systems- and his poetry deals with such issues. By simultaneously employing and redefining traditional poetic forms and models, Hardy does carry out the modernist campaign to reappropriate tradition, redefine it, and “make it new.” By doing this resolutely and deliberately within an English framework, Hardy provides a third strand to British modernist poetry: his English tradition stands alongside Eliot’s and Pound’s American traditions and Yeats’s Celtic tradition. As C. Day-Lewis wrote, “because what [Hardy] gave so unreservedly was the impressions of a magnanimous heart, the thoughts of a mind closely engaged in the problems of its own time and possessed of a strong historical sense, the experience of

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a man thoroughly versed in human suffering, his poetry has that breadth of matter and manner which only a major poet can com-

We might simply add to this that Hardy must no longer be sentenced to the margins of modernist poetry.

Simon Fraser University

” Cecil Day-Lewis, “The Lyrical Poetry,” (Thomas Hardy: Poems, ed. James Gibson and Trevor Johnson [London: Macmillan, 19791, pp. 147-60), p. 149.

Thomas Hardy Modernist Poet

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