Thomas Hardy and Victorian Poetry

B. Ashton Nichols, Associate Professor
Dickinson College

Hardy never found himself in complete sympathy with the Victorian poets active during his own literary career. He intensified Tennyson's uncertainties about the religious doubts attendant on Victorian science and positivism, but he never aspired to the poet laureate's powerfully bardic and heroic voice. Hardy's own lyrics often achieved the spoken harshness and toughness of Browning, but he eschewed Browning's persistently pervasive optimism. "'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came'," was perhaps Browning's most Hardyesque poem. Arnold's classicism was usually anathema to Hardy's rustic simplicity, although Arnold's "Dover Beach" glosses Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush" and "Channel Firing " in important ways.

Hardy has almost none of the pictorial intensity of the early Tennyson and his PreRaphaeltite followers. Hardy's images are often more architectural than pictorial, and his pastoralism is always too personal and autobiographical to be connected with the dream visions of William Morris or with Rossetti's medieval fantasies. Hardy is often Victorian in his emphasis on the failures of human love and the hypocrisies in the social system of his time. He has important, if complicated, links with minor voices like Meredith, Swinburne, and the Decadent poets of the 1890s.

Hardy's most Victorian poem may be the somewhat later "The Convergence of the Twain," an astonishingly realized picture of the Titanic (1912) couched on her eternal sea bed, which takes the sinking of the liner as a metaphor for all the failed hopes and optimism of the era through which Hardy had just lived. He consistently despised "the jewelled line," seeking more often the roughness of the spoken word. Many of his narrative poems have the single-voiced directness of dramatic monologues, but even when he is speaking the ostensible words of someone else, we can almost hear Hardy's voice running along just beneath the surface of the lyric. His is a voice that would wait for the next century to find its best hearers.