Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T06:55:00.361Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

What We Talk about When We Talk about Hardy's Poetry, or How They Brought the Bad News from Essex to Wessex

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Edward Neill
Affiliation:
Middlesex University

Extract

One of the most influential of recent efforts to take Hardy's strange poetic reputation in hand has been that of Donald Davie, himself a poet, who in Thomas Hardy and British Poetry saluted Hardy's “scientific humanism” and noted his poetic “engineering” as that of a poetically “self-made man.” Thus Davie re-made Hardy, creating a combination of a poetic Samuel Smiles and a poetic Isambard Kingdom Brunei conducting himself with technical assurance and brio — but with limited and “mechanical” poetic aims (13, 40). Perhaps it's the “visibly ideological” nature of Davie's performance here which makes it still so arresting, and “smaller and clearer as the years go by.” In a once-famous essay, “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca,” T. S. Eliot complained (or at least explained) that the many writers about him re-made Shakespeare in their own images. Coleridge's “smack of Hamlet,” which read off a Hamlet invested with his own qualities as he construed them, perhaps also indicates how common this sort of thing may be.

Type
Review Essays
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Considered

Alexander, Michael. “Hardy Among the Poets.” In Thomas Hardy After Fifty Years. Ed. Butler, Lance St. John. London: Macmillan, 1977.Google Scholar
Archer, William. Daily Chronicle, 21 Dec. 1898; cited in Blunden, Edmund. Thomas Hardy. London: Macmillan, 1941.Google Scholar
Auden, W.H.A Literary Transference.” Southern Review 6 (19401941), 7886. Rpt. in Hardy: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Albert J. Guerard. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1987.Google Scholar
Bailey, J.O.The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Handbook and Commentary. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1970.Google Scholar
Bergonzi, Bernard, ed. Poetry 1870 to 1914. London: Longman, 1980.Google Scholar
Blackmur, R.P. “The Shorter Poems of Thomas Hardy.” The Southern Review (Summer, 1940). Rpr. in Language as Gesture. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952. 5179.Google Scholar
Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.Google Scholar
Bloom, Harold. A Map of Misreading. New York: Oxford UP, 1975.Google Scholar
Blunden, Edmund. Thomas Hardy. London: Macmillan, 1942.Google Scholar
Bowra, C.M.Inspiration and Poetry. London: Macmillan, 1955.Google Scholar
Butler, Lance St. John. “How It is for Thomas Hardy.” Thomas Hardy after Fifty Years. London: Macmillan, 1977.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Casagrande, Peter J.Hardy's Wordsworth: A Record and a Commentary.” English Literature in Transition 20, no. 4 (1977): 210–37.Google Scholar
Cook, Cornelia. “Thomas Hardy and George Meredith.” In Clements, P. and Grindle, J.. The Poetry of Thomas Hardy. London: Macmillan, 1980. 83100.Google Scholar
Creighton, T. R. M., ed. Poems of Thomas Hardy: A New Selection. London: Macmillan, 1974.Google Scholar
Davie, Donald. “Hardy's Virgilian Purples.” Agenda 10 (1972): 138–56. Rpr. in The Poet in the Imaginary Museum. Manchester: Carcanet, 1977. 221–35.Google Scholar
Davie, Donald. Thomas Hardy and British Poetry. London: Routledge, 1973.Google Scholar
Eliot, T.S.A Choice of Kipling's Verse. London: Faber and Faber, 1941.Google Scholar
Elliott, Ralph W. V.Thomas Hardy's English. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984.Google Scholar
Empson, William. Review of G. M. Young's edition of a Selected Poems of Hardy (New Statesman, 14 September 1940). Rpr. in Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture. Ed. John Haffenden. London: Chatto and Windus, 1987.Google Scholar
Empson, William. Some Versions of Pastoral. London: Chatto and Windus, 1935.Google Scholar
Griffiths, Eric. The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1989. 216–36.Google Scholar
Grigson, Geoffrey. “The Poet Who Did not Care for Life.” The Contrary View: Glimpses of Fudge and Gold. London: Macmillan, 1974. 183–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Havely, Cicely. Thomas Hardy. Milton Keynes: Open UP, 1975.Google Scholar
Holloway, John. “No Answerer I.” The Proud Knowledge: Poetry, Insight and the Self 1620–1920. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977. 233–53.Google Scholar
Howe, Irving. Thomas Hardy. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1968.Google Scholar
Howe, Irving. “Hardy the Obscure.” New York Times Book Review (7 May 1978): 11.Google Scholar
Hynes, Samuel. The Pattern of Hardy's Poetry. North Carolina: Chapel Hill, 1961.Google Scholar
Hynes, Samuel. “The Hardy Tradition in Modern English Poetry.” Thomas Hardy: The Writer and His Background. London: Bell and Hyman, 1980. 173–91.Google Scholar
Johnson, Trevor. “‘Pre-Critical Innocence’ and the Anthologist's Hardy.” Victorian Poetry, 17 (1979): 929.Google Scholar
Johnson, Trevor. A Critical Introduction to the Poems of Thomas Hardy. London: Macmillan, 1991.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kamuf, Peggy, ed. A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. 221–37.Google Scholar
Larkin, Philip. Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955–1982. London: Faber and Faber, 1983.Google Scholar
Leavis, F.R.New Bearings in English Poetry. London: Chatto and Windus, 1932.Google Scholar
Lewis, C. Day. “The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy.” Proceedings of the British Academy 37 (1951): 155–74. Rpr. in James Gibson and Trevor Johnson, eds. Thomas Hardy: Poems: A Collection of Critical Essays. London: Macmillan, 1979. 147–60.Google Scholar
Lucas, John. “Thomas Hardy, Donald Davie, England and the English.” Thomas Hardy Annual 1 (1982). 134–51.Google Scholar
Lucas, John. “Thomas Hardy: Voices and Visions.” Modern English Poetry from Hardy to Hughes: A Critical Survey. London: B. T. Batsford, 1986. 22–49.Google Scholar
Macbeth, George, ed. The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.Google Scholar
Marsden, Kenneth. The Poems of Thomas Hardy: A Critical Introduction. London: Athlone Press, 1969.Google Scholar
McCarthy, Robert. “Hardy and ‘The Lonely Burden of Consciousness’: The Poet's Flirtation with the Void.” English Literature in Transition 1880–1920, 23 (1980): 8998.Google Scholar
Macdowall, Arthur. Thomas Hardy: A Critical Study. London: Macmillan, 1931.Google Scholar
Mahar, Margaret. “Hardy's Poetry of Renunciation.” ELH 45 (1987). Rpr. in Thomas Hardy (Modern Critical Views). Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. 155–73.Google Scholar
Miller, J. Hillis. The Linguistic Moment: From Wordsworth to Stevens. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985.Google Scholar
Morrison, Blake. The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980.Google Scholar
Murfin, Ross C. “New Words: Swinburne and the Poetry of Thomas Hardy.” Swinburne, Lawrence, Hardy and the Burden of Belief. London: U of Chicago P, 1978. Rpr. in H. Bloom, ed. Thomas Hardy: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1987: 137–53.Google Scholar
Page, Norman. Thomas Hardy. London: Routledge, 1977.Google Scholar
Palgrave, Francis T., ed. The Golden Treasury. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1964.Google Scholar
Paulin, Tom. “Time and Sense Experience: Hardy and T. S. Eliot.” In Budmouth Essays on Thomas Hardy. Ed. Pinion, F. B.. Dorchester: The Thomas Hardy Society Ltd., 1976. 192204.Google Scholar
Paulin, Tom. Thomas Hardy: The Poetry of Perception. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1986.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perkins, David. “Hardy and the Poetry of Isolation.” ELH 26 (1959): 253–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pinion, F.B.A Commentary on the Poems of Thomas Hardy. London: Macmillan, 1976.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pound, Ezra. ABC of Reading. London: Faber and Faber, 1951.Google Scholar
Pound, Ezra. Guide to Kulchur. New York: New Directions, 1970.Google Scholar
Pound, Ezra. Selected Letters of Ezra Pound. Ed. Paige, D. D.. London: Faber and Faber, 1950.Google Scholar
Pound, Ezra and Spann, Marcella. From Confucius to Cummings. New York: New Directions, 1964.Google Scholar
Quiller-Couch, Arthur, ed. The Oxford Book of English Verse. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1900.Google Scholar
Ramazani, Jahan. “Hardy's Elegies for an Era: ‘By the Century's Deathbed.’Victorian Poetry, 29 (1991): 131–43.Google Scholar
Richards, I.A.Some Notes on Thomas Hardy's Verse Forms.” Victorian Poetry 17 (1979): 18.Google Scholar
Richardson, James. Thomas Hardy: The Poetry of Necessity. London: Macmillan, 1977.Google Scholar
Ricks, Christopher. New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987.Google Scholar
Ricks, Christopher. “A Note on Hardy's ‘A Spellbound Palace.’” Essays in Appreciation. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1996. 235–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robinson, Peter. “In Another's Words: Thomas Hardy's Poetry.” English 31 (1982): 221–46.Google Scholar
Royle, Nicholas. After Derrida. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995.Google Scholar
Rutland, W.R.Thomas Hardy: A Study of his Writings and their Background. Oxford: Blackwell, 1938.Google Scholar
Sacks, Peter. “Hardy: ‘A Singer Asleep’ and Poems of 1912–13.” The English Elegy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985. 227–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schur, Owen. “A Dwelling's Character: from Pastoral to the Country House in Hardy.” Victorian Pastoral: Tennyson, Hardy and the Subversion of Forms. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1989. 200–18.Google Scholar
Seymour-Smith, Martin. Hardy. London: Bloomsbury, 1994.Google Scholar
Strachey, Lytton. “Mr. Hardy's New Poems.” The New Statesman (Dec. 19, 1914). Republished by Strachey in Characters and Commentaries. London: Chatto and Windus, 1933. 195201.Google Scholar
Taylor, Dennis. “Hardy and Wordsworth.” Victorian Poetry 24 (1986): 441–54.Google Scholar
Taylor, Dennis. Hardy's Poetry, 1860–1928. 2nd. ed.London: Macmillan, 1989.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, Dennis. Hardy's Literary Language and Victorian Philology. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1993.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thatcher, David. “Another Look at Hardy's ‘Afterwards.’Victorian Newsletter 38 (1970): 1418.Google Scholar
Thomas, Dylan. Letters to Vernon Watkins. Ed. Watkins, Vernon. London: Dent, 1957.Google Scholar
Thomas, Dylan. “An Introduction to Thomas Hardy.” An Evening with Dylan Thomas. Caedmon Records, 1963.Google Scholar
Turner, Paul. Victorian Poetry, Drama and Miscellaneous Prose 1832–1890. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1989.Google Scholar
Van Doren, Mark. Autobiography. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958.Google Scholar
Wain, John. Professing Poetry. London: Macmillan, 1977.Google Scholar
Ward, J.P.Thomas Hardy's Poetry. Milton Keynes: Open UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Weber, Carl J.Hardy of Wessex. New York: Columbia UP, 1940. [2nd ed. 1962].Google Scholar
Weiss, Theodore. “The Many-Sidedness of Modernism.” Times Literary Supplement, 1 February 1980: 124–25.Google Scholar
Widdowson, Peter. Hardy in History: A Study in Literary Sociology London: Routledge, 1989.Google Scholar
Witek, Terri. “Repetition in a Land of Unlikeness: What Life Will not be Balked of in Thomas Hardy's Poetry.” Victorian Poetry 28 (1990): 119–28.Google Scholar
Young, G.M., ed. Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems. London: Macmillan, 1940.Google Scholar
Yeats, W.B.Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935. London: Oxford UP, 1936.Google Scholar