We sometimes forget that Hardy was born as early as 1840 and died as late as 1928. He had affinities with W. B. Yeats in his use of strangely materialist spirits in his poems; Robert Frost, in his tendency to make the domestic seem portentous; and Dylan Thomas, in his willingness to let the demands of regularized meter occasionally overwhelm the ability to make meaning out of his syntax. The awkwardness of much of Hardy's poetic language, his strange enjambments, and the almost "sprung" quality of so many of his rhythms anticipate alternately the tough spoken quality and the breezy conversationalism of vast amounts of more recent verse.
"Snow in the Suburbs," for example, blends a gentle nineteenth-century softness, "there is no waft of wind with the fleecy fall," with a stark twentieth-century bluntness, "A black cat comes, wide-eyed and thin; / And we take him in." Hardy's coinages often sound Victorian and stilted to our ears--outleant, doomsters, firmamental, inurns--but he plays with sound and sense in ways that would not be lost on the Beats or the New Formalists. Recent voices as diverse as Philip Larkin, Adrienne Rich, Derek Walcott, and Seamus Heaney all testify to Hardy's lasting poetic authority and inventiveness.