Introduction

Abstract

The dangers of superimposing a consistent philosophy on Thomas Hardy’s widely disparate poems are fully as great as Hardy, in his preface to Poems of the Past and the Present, claimed they were:

… that portion which may be regarded as individual comprises a series of feelings and fancies written down in widely differing moods and circumstances, and at various dates; it will probably be found, therefore, to possess little cohesion of thought or harmony of colouring. I do not greatly regret this. Unadjusted 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.

When, to this caveat, a conscientious reader adds his uneasy awareness of the problems created by Hardy’s failure to date a large number of his poems, Hardy’s willingness to use poems written during any of several decades for a new collection, Hardy’s warning that the ‘mere impres?sions of the moment’ should not be mistaken for ‘convictions or argu?ments’, and Hardy’s hope that ‘finely-touched spirits’ among his readers would be sufficiently alert for ‘right note-catching’, he may well conclude the poet has presented him with ‘miscellanies of verse’, with all the dilemmas of ordering and analysis that such miscellanies inevitably impose.