Thomas Hardy as a Poet

B. Ashton Nichols, Associate Professor
Dickinson College

Hardy saw himself as a poet from the earliest stages of his literary career. Over the course of his life he produced over 900 lyrics, many of them occasional, a few of them works of lasting lyrical genius. Hardy wrote poems before his career as an architect and during the entire time he was writing novels as a means of making a literary living. By 1896, hostile reviews of Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, combined with his own continuing anxieties about the literary value of the novel form, led him to abandon novel writing in favor of poetry for the remainder of his life.

 His first volume of lyrics, Wessex Poems, was not published until 1898, although many of its verses dated from the 1860s. Early critics faulted Hardy's poems as they had his novels, for their fatalistic pessimism, earthy realism, and abstract philosophizing. He was taken to task for what appeared to be the repetitious simplicity of many of his lyric forms. He was also accused of writing lyrics that were flawed by the pervasiveness of the philosophy that informed them. Gothic architecture loomed in the back of Hardy's mind throughout his career as a poet, providing a powerful model for artistic unity and complexity.

Recent critics have praised the self-declared "evolutionary meliorism" of his poems, the ironic stances so often achieved by his powerful psychological insights, and the modernist spareness and roughness of his metrical experiments. His is, quintessentially, a poetry of loss, harsh nostalgia, and the despairing limits of human hope and love. In some respects, Hardy considered himself first and foremost a poet throughout his literary life. Although his poetic reputation may finally come to rest on a handful of powerful lyrics--"Neutral Tones," "Nature's Questioning," "Bereft," "Logs on a Hearth," "The Convergence of the Twain," and "Afterwards" among them--these are nevertheless poems which helped to define his age and which point in crucial ways toward the poetry of our own millennial century.