Thomas Hardy Indy Clark (bio) Once again, many people have written about Hardy’s poems, which is certainly something to celebrate, even if it does make compiling this article a little more difficult. The themes of mourning and loss are particularly prominent this time around, and many of the pieces consider ghosts that speak and those that listen. As a result of these interests, the “Poems of 1912–13” feature quite heavily, with “Your Last Drive” a central poem in many of the responses. That said, there are some fascinating readings of a few of the more unusual poems, and other topics include animals, building on the work of Anna West and Seamus Perry from last year, and melodious explorations of music and metre. Galia Benziman’s Thomas Hardy’s Elegiac Prose and Poetry: Codes of Bereavement (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) explores how Hardy’s poetry breaks from traditional conventions of mourning, arguing that “Hardy’s complex stagings of remembrance are highly ambivalent. Keenly aware of the inconsistencies and paradoxes of mourning and the inherent contradictions in its poetic expression, Hardy revises traditional elegy” (pp. 1–2). That Hardy was concerned with death, bereavement, and memory will come as no surprise to anyone even passingly acquainted with his work, but it is through an interrogation of the inconsistency and unreliability of the latter that Benziman establishes Hardy’s contribution to a modern form of elegy. The nineteenth century has often been described as the “era of mourning” (p. 7), and the social practices are considered briefly in the introduction, but Benziman argues that there were changes afoot throughout the Victorian age. The growth of scientific thinking and the subsequent loss of faith are instrumental in those changes. Mill and Freud underpin much of the critical reading, as Benziman suggests that the Victorian need for such deep mourning is displaced by utilitarianism and psychoanalysis, making the practice redundant, pathological, and, therefore, unproductive. By the modern era, mourning becomes “personal and familial” rather than “national or social” (p. 10). The book reads elegy as a mode rather than a form, and this allows for a chapter that considers Hardy’s fiction. With regard to his poetry, the “Poems of 1912–13” are deliberately elided to allow for a wider and more original selection that moves away from a biographical reading and considers the importance of language. Drawing on Derrida, Benziman states, “The textual object of loss is subject to the control of language, which can rewrite, remember, dismember and obliterate the dead as part of the very effort to commemorate them” (p. 31). [End Page 326] Throughout the chapters, Hardy’s work is read in the context of other elegists including Milton, Shelley, and Wordsworth, and there are many examples representing the breadth of his considerable output. As so often with Hardy, he is read here as a transitional figure, standing between the Victorian and modern conceptualization of mourning. “His contribution to twentieth-century elegy,” argues Benziman, “can especially be seen in the ambiguity regarding the personal and poetic commitment towards grief and memory” (p. 22). It is perhaps in the use of the typically Hardyan qualities of “down-to-earth sentiment and irony” that the poet’s contribution is particularly marked (p. 24). Speaking with the dead and, indeed, listening to the dead speak are also central concerns in Elizabeth Helsinger’s “Conversing in Verse” (ELH 84, no. 4 [2017]: 979–1003), as she explores what she refers to as “ballad talk,” or conversation when used in traditional or modern popular song and verse, in both Hardy’s and Christina Rossetti’s poetry. “Conversation,” Helsinger argues, “has an intimate verbal connection with verse,” with both words deriving from the Latin versare, “to turn.” The con combines with versare to produce a word that makes “patterns of turn-taking for two or more participants” (p. 980). In the poetry under scrutiny here, however, this pattern is often complicated by one of the turn-takers being dead. Central to the reading is Paul Celan’s idea of “desperate” verse conversations, which “seem to be foreclosed from the start, so absent, dead, or utterly other, inhuman or nonhuman, are the phenomena of the world...

This book reads Hardy's poetry of the rural as deeply rooted in the historical tradition of the pastoral mode even as it complicates and extends it. It shows that in addition to reinstating the original tensions of classical pastoral, Hardy dramatizes a heightened awareness of complex communities and the relations of class, labour, and gender.

In 1927, Florence, the second Mrs Hardy, wrote as follows in her diary for 27 November: T. H. has been writing almost all the day—revising poems. He showed me one at tea-time, about a bitter desolate spring day—and a shepherd counting his sheep and not noticing the weather.

In an interview from 1892, Hardy is recorded as saying, 'sometimes I am described as the novelist of the agricultural labourer … That is not inclusive, I think. It is not true of A Laodicean, Two on a Tower, Desperate Remedies, and the volume of short stories I published last year called, A Group of Noble Dames' (Ray 18–19). The examples Hardy offers suggest that he was keen to point out to the readers of Cassell's Saturday Journal that his writing does not focus upon rural workfolk at the expense of all other classes; rather, it is also concerned with the professional and aristocratic sections of society. Indeed, it is Hardy's background and experience that extend his knowable community to include the relations between the multiple strata of nineteenth-century class structure. His early years in the often-insecure intermediate rural class, so crucial to the reading of his work by Merryn Williams and Raymond Williams, brought him into contact with labourers, skilled workers, professionals, and landowners. It is this early experience that explains Hardy's acute awareness of the minutiae of class relations as well as his sympathy for and understanding of agricultural workers. Even as an architect with links to London, Hardy never lost his connection with rural Dorset, but his professional training was the beginning of his upward social mobility that continued to unimaginable levels with his success as a writer.

Hardy’s pastoral is a result of his position as observer. As shown by the previous chapter’s discussion of Hardy’s realism, the way in which he read and reproduced the natural world was not simply a result of the inventorial reporting of surface realities. Instead, his reading of the natural landscape and, therefore, his pastoral, looks deeper into the processes at work beneath the surface. In order to understand Hardy’s approach to the bucolic, it is necessary to explore the influences on his ways of seeing the rural environment, chief amongst which are Romantic subjectivity and Darwinian science. It is a combination of these ways of seeing that contributes to the uniqueness of Hardy’s pastoral. In his poetry of the rural, Hardy recognizes the politics of landscape, the construction of nature, and the primacy of work; perhaps most importantly, he understands the interconnectedness of all three. At the centre of my reading of Hardy’s poetry of the rural is the complex relationship in Wessex between the representation of landscape, nature, and work.

By the end of the nineteenth century many commentators may have been reporting the death of pastoral as a literary convention, but the pastoral impulse was alive and well thanks largely to modernity. As Susan Stanford Friedman has argued, any attempt to define 'modernity' is confounded by dissonance, difference, and, perhaps most importantly, an opposition between the meanings signified by social theorists on the one hand and aestheticians on the other. Modernity, she claims, 'is a term at war with itself, a term that unravels its own definition' (505). For my purposes, I am considering the effects of a modernity characterized by 'a specific set of historical conditions developing in the West, including the industrial revolution … the transition to urban culture, the rise of the nation state, and growing power of the bourgeoisie' (500). Industrial capitalism, the driving force of Western modernity, had created factories, cities, and two new classes in the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The wealth and power of the latter — largely at the expense of the former — were not enough to appease their sense of loss over a world they had played a large part in destroying. Past societies were seen as more organic, more coherent; their simple ways of life would assuage the feelings of rootlessness and alienation that the modern world had brought with it.

“Mr. Hardy has never written with flowing rhythms,” wrote an anonymous reviewer of Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), “his verse often halts, or dances in hobnails.” Contemporary criticism of Thomas Hardy’s poetry is littered with references to his “woodenness of rhythm,” “technical inexpertness,” “clumsy metres,” and “lack of metrical finish.” His poetry is described as “slovenly, slipshod,” and “uncouth,” “poorly conceived and worse wrought.” Referring to poems in Hardy’s first collection, Wessex Poems (1898), one critic laments, “were the form equal to the matter, they would be poetry.” It was in reaction to this kind of criticism that Hardy wrote in the Life, “there was … as regards form, the inevitable ascription to ignorance of what was really choice after full knowledge.” In an attempt to show that his poetry was not simply the sudden and undoubtedly shortlived whim of an established novelist, Hardy states that “[y]ears earlier he had decided that too regular a beat was bad art.”His explanation draws upon his years of training and experience as an architect, which, according to Linda Shires, “was not merely a preliminary career but an important crucible for much of his art and labour to come.”