Thomas Hardy: Moments of Vision

Abstract

As the growing list of Hardy criticism testifies, his poetic achievement is at last being given the degree of attention which has for so long been accorded almost exclusively to his novels. There had been earlier pioneering work by Samuel Hynes (The Pattern of Hardy’s Poetry, 1956) and J. Hillis Miller (Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire, 1970), but it was Donald Davie’s Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (1973) which first drew attention to Hardy’s position as a major influence on modern English verse. This was soon followed by two further critical studies - Paul Zietlow’s Moments of Vision: The Poetry of Thomas Hardy (1974), and Tom Paulin’s Thomas Hardy: The Poetry of Perception (1975) - and, more recently, by Dennis Taylor’s book Hardy’s Poetry 1860-1928 (1981). These important books marked the beginning of a revaluation of Hardy’s poetic art that had been long overdue, and, in their concern with the nature of Hardy’s poetic imagination and their emphasis on the qualities of compassion and hope in his poetry, Zietlow and Paulin in particular go a long way towards redressing the balance in Hardy criticism. J. Hillis Miller, for instance, regarded Hardy essentially as a passive poet trapped in a mechanistic universe; while Geoffrey Thurley in The Ironic Harvest (1974) marshalled an apparently strong case against Hardy. For Thurley, because the existentialist’s search for meaning can result only in total self-effacement, Hardy ‘annihilates . . . metaphysics, mythology, transcendence, rhetoric’.1 Thus in Thurley’s view Hardy marks the degeneration of English verse from the Romantics’ pursuit of transcendence and its accompanying rhetoric of the egotistical sublime, and what has been lost in Hardy and subsequent poets, he concludes, is the isense of meaningfulness associated with poetic rhetoric’.2