In Hynes' article, "The Hardy Tradition in Modern English Poetry," the author discusses the characteristics of Hardy's works that make his poetry relevant in later eras. Unlike the work of a poet like Eliot, Hardy's poetry is "explicitly English, descr iptive, lyrical, and formally regular and whole" (Hynes 175). Hynes refers to Hardy as the "principal progenitor of the tradition in this century" (175). Hardy's poetry is unique in that it invokes memory through his depiction of familiar places and obj ects, to which readers may universally relate. Hardy's notion of the past is not bookish and cold, like Eliot's, but rather "stirs both melancholy and a stoic regret of the irrevocable passage of time" (178).
Ash Nichols has described Hardy as a "poet of Romantic longings and Victorian subject matter who nonetheless managed to present his poems in a powerfully modernist voice." He maintains that though the poet may sound Victorian and "stilted," his work has a "lasting poetic authority and inventiveness" which has influenced numerous contemporary writers. Because of his ability to interlock various experiences together as a whole, Professor Ambercrombie believes that Hardy stands as a "harbinger of the mode rn age in poetry" (Chakravarty 152).
Hardy's poetry, and the ideas he conveys through his work, are known to have strongly influenced poets of the twentieth century. Ezra Pound, Robert Graves, and D.H. Lawrence have identified themselves as beneficiaries of Thomas Hardy and his poetry. Har dy was a poet who wrote on a world of specific places and times. Vernon Watkins and Dylan Thomas once said, "one could never write a poem dominated by time as Hardy could" (Hynes 177). Hardy's disbelief in the ability of poetry to transcend time sets him at odd
Hynes, Samuel, "The Hardy Tradition in Modern English Poetry," Thomas Hardy: The Writer and His Background, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1980.