Andrew's Wiki
Hardy Poems

Hardy

• Read Darwin, Mill, Spencer, Huxley
• A transitional figure in poetry, from Victorian to modernism
  • Said that there aren’t actually any new poets, but only “a new note” that the poet brings to “carry the flame on further”
• If he could have supported himself by it, would’ve only been a poet, not a novelist
  • But his early verses even got rejected
  • Quite well supported by his novels
• His best poetry: 1910-1920, very plain, direct style
  • Didn’t change much over time, though; only become a little less pained and artificial
• Pound on Hardy’s Collected Poems: “Now there is clarity. There is the harvest of having written twenty novels first.”
• Variety
  • Of Forms, diff meters, stanza forms, etc
  • Of Personae, did dramatic monologues as well as autobiographical poems
• Strange Vocabulary
  • dialect, archaicisms, rare words, neologisms / his own coinages: all words are all available for any poem (see William Archer on Hardy’s anarchism)
• More a part of an oral tradition, like Burns or Kavanaugh
  • “one of the last English poets to be brought up in a pre-industrial world” (David Wright 16, who also says that his mastery of repetition and refrain makes Yeats’ own use of them look amateurish and fake)
    • Hardy for example was part of a family band that would play for local parties, festivals; even while he was training to be an architect and reading up in the classics: thus he knew folk songs
• Folk Song Style
  • Hardy says the way to having living style rather than dead style is “not too much style—being, in fact, a little careless, or rather seeming to be, here and there” with “inexact rhymes and rhythms” which are “more pleasing”
    • He had learned this from architecture, his autobio works reveal: the irregularities makes good architecture (note: to me this sounds likes pure Ruskin, and he DOES say he was trained in the Gothic style), spontaneity and texture, not “veneer”
    • thus, pauses and reversed rhythms (very Hopkins)

Themes

• Leaving: “The Division,” “The Last Performance,” “The Going”
• Loss: “In Death Divided,” “Lost Love”
• Death: “A Circular” (someone receives a fashion advertisement for a dead woman)
• Memory: “At Castle Boterel,” “A Death-Day Recalled,” “Looking at a Picture on an Anniversary”
• Possibility unrealized: “A Broken Appointment”
• Poems at Inns: “At an Inn,” where the innkeepers think they’re lovers who’ve abandoned the families in high-stakes intrigue, but actually they’re a couple who’ve lost their love for each other (there’s a narrative of inns here: the lovers escaping)
• Weird: “The Strange House,” he imagines the residents of his house, Max Gate, in the year 2000 (being haunted by the events that happened during his lifetime there, but not caring too much about it)
• Music: lots of poems set during musical performances or refer to them
• Some interesting reversals: “You Were the Sort that Men Forgot” has a narrator who is the only one who remembers the object of love

Weirdest Poem! “Friends Beyond”

• This poem is the weirdest structurally and NOT coincidentally, it says something completely different. Instead of the living sighing about the past, or imagining how sadly people move on, we have the perspective of the DEAD saying, I just don’t care.
  • This accompanies a disruption of the intricacy of verses that Hardy usually has and makes it a narrative that itself includes exposition, a chorus, individual speakers, and interpretive commentary. Very interesting.
  • Hardy does have a glib way of dealing with loss, death, disappointment, etc, putting them into rhymed verses w/visual harmony etc… but here it’s completely different.
    • And it’s bleaker than death. Pound’s and Eliot’s and Yeats’ old people have uses for now: Pound’s appear contemporary and give contemporary advice; Eliot’s help you understand the present; and Yeats’ give you a standard to live up to
    • This willingness to say something the public won’t want to here is analogous to the modernist spirit of epater le bourgeosie.
• “Friends Beyond”
  • Talking about the people he knew who are dead now
  • Says that at midnight they start whispering to him
  • And then the poem turns dramatic, with designations of the speaker preceding their lines, very cool
  • Content: Death is great b/c all is success now, can’t be cold or hungry, and they don’t fear death anymore; they don’t care if you burn their houses down, marry their spouses, or ruin their property. Go ahead! they say. And they don’t care what you’re doing.

Form

• One single idea is usually realized each time in every single verse, just using different details to explain it more carefully (“The Lament”)