Thomas Hardy and Romantic Poetry

B. Ashton Nichols, Associate Professor
Dickinson College

Hardy had greater affinity for the Romantic poets who were his predecessors than for many of his Victorian contemporaries. He expressed lifelong admiration for Shelley and Keats, although his own verse intensifies the skeptical side of Shelley's skeptical idealism and the stoical side of Keats's stoical optimism. His robust and vivid naturalism owes lasting debts to Wordsworth and Coleridge, even while he remains at philosophical odds with romantic idealism in all its forms. He often adopts the meditative style of so many Romantic lyrics, but he tends to replace the consolations found often in Wordsworth or Coleridge with a stark and diminished sense of sadness or longing. His lyrical descriptions of nature are more likely to be harsh and cruel than they are to be pastoral and calming, but his naturalistic impulse provides powerful sensory moments that are realized with astonishing sharpness and immediacy.

Hardy's "Shelley's Skylark," for example, imagines the literal dust that Shelley's poetic symbol has become: it "Lived its meek life; then, one day, fell-- / A little ball of feather and bone." It often seems as though Hardy is struggling to be a Romantic poet but finding it impossible to do so. He manages to combine what looks like the subjectivity of the Romantic first-person speaker with the more objective voice of a ballad or folk song. A poem like "A Singer Asleep" invokes pastoral elegy to achieve an almost visionary intensity, but the pastoral is more usually invoked in Hardy's lyrics in order to be shown up as a poetic illusion.

His own "darkling thrush" is a long way from Shelley's skylark or Keats's nightingale, but it is a sign of their influence over Hardy that he gains astonishing poetic resonance by imagining a hitherto "romantic" creature as "frail, gaunt" and "blast-beruffled." Hardy was not the "last" Romantic, but he may have been the last poet who longed for, while not being able to assert, the confidence and poetic authority of his Romantic predecessors.