Thomas Hardy

There could not be a more "English" writer than Thomas Hardy. As either poet or novelist Hardy's subjects were quintessentially English: in character, locale and sensitivity. Born in 1840 three years after the birth of Queen Victoria, dying in 1928, Hardy lived in an era when the English "way" - thought, power, economics and language - were the predominant force in and on world affairs. Yet this was not the "Englishness" of which Thomas Hardy was a part. The world of Thomas Hardy, particularly in his poetry, was a place in southern England, Dorset county specifically, an agriculturally-oriented lowland touching the coast of the English Channel. It was an England "far from the madding crowd" of London, divorced from the Celtic mysticism of Cornwall and Wales, scarcely touched by the industrialism of the more northerly Newcastles and Birminghams. For all of these "nots," Thomas Hardy's England was also not an idyllic pastoral world, but an often-hard place of specific personalities and souls, of worldview and limitations. In the writings of Hardy, the classic conflict between basic human passions and an indifferent universe is played out in this England as a gesture of significance beyond the limitations of being "English" - English in all its connotations.

He wrote as a ballad-maker would if a ballad-maker were to have to write novels... (Davidson 12).

It can be said that Thomas Hardy "blundered and stumbled into greatness" (Guerard, 1). Born in Dorset, trained as

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ing true to everyday reality; the sense of wonder and the foot soldier's solidarity with the enemy foot soldier are not prettied up with literary finesse. At the same time, something greater has been created from this ordinariness. Poet W. H. Auden called it: ...his hawk vision, his way of looking at life from a very great height. ...To see the individual life related not only to the local social life of its time, but to the whole of human history, life on the earth, the stars... (139). Thomas Hardy's fatalism was often mistaken for pessimism - a critical mistake easily made if one forgets how often traditional ballads and song express a sense of saddened wisdom. In "The Man He Killed," above, that saddened wisdom may be construed as pessimistic - men will kill men - or cautious optimism: despite the dictates of war, individuals recognize the humanity in one another. Hardy's is not a simplistic formula. As he approaches themes of an interior nature, i.e. autobiographical, Thomas Hardy's poetry loses neither its realistic basis nor its psychological insight. Typical are the series of poems he wrote following the death of Emma Lavinia Gifford in 1912. Emma was the great romance of Hardy's life. They met on the wild Cornis

Category: Literature - T