11 - Hardy as a nineteenth-century poet

Summary

In the Victorian period, poetry was still the high genre of literature. Speaking of his early twenties, Hardy said: “A sense of the truth of poetry, of its supreme place in literature, had awakened itself in me” (LW, p. 415). “Poetry,” he said in 1912, “is the heart of literature” (PW, p. 246). As Hardy (born in 1840) began to write in the 1860s, the era of Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold was slowly changing into the era of Swinburne, Hopkins, and Hardy. This formulation would surprise contemporary Victorians, since Hopkins and Hardy's poetries were not well known until the twentieth century. Even in the twentieth century, while Hopkins became celebrated by the new critics, Hardy remained a controversial case as a poet, partly because of his fame as a novelist, partly because of certain characteristics of his verse that were less amenable than Hopkins's to the analytic methods of the new criticism. Yet now Hardy is seen as a primary source in the founding of a major stream of modern English poetry, as charted for example by Donald Davie. Only in the last half of the twentieth century has Hardy's major stature as a poet come to be assumed.