Hardy’s Poetic Manifesto

Abstract

As a definitive argument Hardy’s prose ‘Apology’, his preface to Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922), is an unprepossessing statement – often cynical in content, angular in expression, and more than half of it made disingenuous by a lame and transparent stalking-horse that vainly attempts to conceal an old man’s rancorous diffidence about publishing yet another volume of his verse. Some two years before writing his ‘Apology,’ Hardy self-effacingly regarded himself ‘merely a dusty figure on a shelf’, ‘a cracked old pot at the best’, and ‘piping but a feeble reed now & then’. Nevertheless the preface is, as a recent editor notes, the ‘longest critical defence of his poems’ Hardy ever made — presumably because Hardy suspected, as he approached eighty-two in the discomfort of a sick-bed, that the publication of a new volume of poems might well be his last opportunity to validate, once and for all, his verse as poetry.¹