Hardy and the Poets of World War I

Andrew P. Ciotola, Class of 1996
Gettysburg College

Thomas Hardy's philosophical sense of pessimistic gloom was of paraamount importance as an influence on the so called "trench poetry" of the First World War. Though the mark of his legacy on the war's poetry would appear to be pervasive, three poets whose work displays a particularly profound level of influence are Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Edmund Blunden. As Paul Fussell explains, the satirical irony of Hardy's philosophical outlook verged on the prophetic in its evocation of the mood the war poets would adopt: "From his imagination was available more or less ready-made. . . a vision, an action, and a tone superbly suitable for rendering and event constituting an immense and unprecedented Satire of Circumstance." Hardy's growing sense of a morally vacuous cosmos represents a departure from nineteenth-century Romanticism and Victorian sentimentalism and a plummet towards the irony that has characterized the literature of modern times. In short, the war poets, starved for a model sufficient for rendering into art their own sense of moral disillusionment, would find in Hardy's example an appropriate means for doing so. Hardy's career was marked by an emotional struggle between the optimism of Victorian positivists and his own sense of scientific determinism. Though one could cite many examples, the latter finds its consummation, perhaps, in Satires of Circumstance, published on the eve of the war. For our own post-modern sensibilities, the ironic is anything but shocking, yet a glance at the poetry of Georgian and Edwardian England will suffice to prove how utterly nouveau such an outlook actually was in the historical and literary context.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Gibson, James, ed., The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy. (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company., Inc., 1976).

Silken, Jon, ed., The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry. (London: Penguin, 1981).

Criticism

Bergonzi, Bernard, Heroe's Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War. (London: Penguin, 1965).

Caesar, Adrian, Taking it Like a Man: Suffering, Sexuality, and the War Poets, Brooke, Sassoon, Owen, Graves. (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1993).

Eksteins, Modris, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age. (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1989).

Fussell, Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory. (London: Oxford, 1975).

Graham Desmond, "Poetry of the First World War," in Martin Dodsworth, ed., The Twentieth Century. (London: Penguin, 1994).

Hibberd, Dominic, Poetry of the First World War: A Selection of Critical Essays. (London: Macmillan, 1981).

Hynes, Samuel, A War Imaginined: The First World War and English Culture. (New York: Collier Books, 1990).

Johnston, John H., English Poetry of the First World War: A Study in the Evolution of Narrative Form. (Princeton: Princeton, 1964).

Parfitt, George, English Poetry of the First World War: Contexts and Themes. (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990).

Reilly, Catherine, English Poetry of the First World War: A Bibliography. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978).

Silken, Jon, Out of Battle, The Poetry of the First World War. (London: Penguin, 1972).

Vansittart, Peter, Voices from the Great War. (New York: Avon Books, 1981).