Reviews

Abstract

Professor Buckler’s study is a fascinating mixture of acute and genuinely revealing perceptions about Hardy’s poetic writing, and some startlingly over-ingenious elaborations of what Hardy intended in quite straightforward poems. The healthy effect of this approach is that he never tempts us to under-estimate Hardy as a thinker and poet. He does Hardy the credit of being entirely in control of the persona he had invented for himself, and which he displayed not only in individual poems and groups of poems, but also in the autobiographical Life. He provides a corrective to any view which suggests that Hardy was evasive or casual.