Reflections on Hardy’s Poetry

Abstract

The title immediately raises the question whether poetry is restricted to the artistic forms of verse. Leslie Stephen, writing to Hardy (who had noted in 1885 that his approval was ‘disapproval minimized’) on the pleasure he had found in reading Wessex Poems, told him how he had ‘admired the poetry which was diffused through the prose’ when Far from the Madding Crowd came out under his serial editorship. In Hardy’s fiction from the first, and very strikingly in Desperate Remedies, it was to remain, not just in succinct felicities but in larger wholes of setting and human situation, emerging exquisitely or intensely in comparative imagery, or voicing the deeper overtones of life and death. In this respect there are passages in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and scenic notes in The Dynasts which have greater imaginative distinctness than appears in the majority of Hardy’s poems. Verse, whether rhymed or unrhymed, has other graces, however: deft and intricate stanzaic craftsmanship, memorability, and, above all, aptness of emphasis and subtleties of movement.