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Victorian Modernism: The Arnold-Hardy Succession
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
Extract
The Thesis that I shall maintain in this essay is suggestive rather than probative. The poetry of both Arnold and Hardy is in a state of critical flux at the present time, interest in the former just beginning to emerge from a long period of critical drabness, and acclaim for the latter finally beginning to erase the autobiographical and ideological structures in which it has been too long imprisoned. Thus our critical premises about both their poetic canons are simply too volatile and variable to admit of critical conclusiveness. Moreover, Hardy was both the least imitative and the most cryptically allusive of poets, and even when he rewrote an earlier poet's work, in the sense that “While Drawing in a Churchyard” is a rewriting of “A slumber did my spirit seal,” the attachment ot the original was extremely delicate and the fiction, idiom, and angle of vision of the new rendering distinctly idiosyncratic.
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References
NOTES
1. Hardy, Florence Emily, The Life of Thomas Hardy 1840–1928 (London: Macmillan, 1962), p. 361.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2. Letters of Matthew Arnold 1848–1888, ed. Russell, G. W. E. (New York: Macmillan, 1895), II, 2, 10.Google Scholar
3. Preface to The Dynasts (London: Macmillan, 1965), p. xxv.Google Scholar
4. Life, p. 383.Google Scholar
5. Life, p. 320.Google Scholar
6. Preface to Poems (1853), in the Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. Super, R. H. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), I, 1.Google Scholar
7. The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. Gibson, James (New York: Macmillan, 1976), p. 557.Google Scholar
8. Complete Prose Works, ed. Super, , I, 8.Google Scholar
9. “Heinrich Heine,” Complete Prose Works, ed. Super, , III, 109, 125.Google Scholar
10. “Heinrich Heine,” Complete Prose Works, ed. Super, , III, 110.Google Scholar
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12. Life, p. 291.Google Scholar
13. The phrase is Arnold's (“in poetry the idea is everything”).
14. After 1877, Arnold moved it into the category of “Early Poems.” See The Matthew Arnold, ed. Allott, Miriam, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1979), pp. 113–14.Google Scholar
15. Preface to Poems (1853), Complete Prose Works, ed. Super, , 1, 2.Google Scholar
16. Poetic inadequacy may be inherent in the subject or it may result from the poet's manner of treating his subject. See Preface to Poems (1853), Complete Prose Works, ed. Super, , 1, 2–3Google Scholar, and On Translating Homer, 1, 210.Google Scholar
17. Preface to Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses, in Complete Poems, ed. Gibson, , p. 190.Google Scholar
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19. It made her “miserable to think that he had ever suffered so much,” especially “when he was so cruelly treated” over Jude the Obscure. Letters of 6 and 9 December 1914, from Mrs. Florence Hardy to Ada, Lady Hoare, quoted by Bailey, J. O., the Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Handbook and Commentary (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970), p. 274.Google Scholar
20. Life, p. 363Google Scholar. Hardy's remarks were made with particular reference to Anatole France, but they turn upon his idea of “the principles that make for permanence” in “the literature of narrative and verse.”
21. The speaker in Dover Beach implies an inevitable connection between the ebb of the “Sea of Faith” and existential despair. This is a contradiction of the tragic vision of Sophocles, who had no experience of this Sea of Faith, and seems to suggest that the speaker suffers from the Manichaean outlook or sensibility especially prevalent in the Middle Ages.