The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy

The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy

Edmund Gosse's essay traces the emergence of Thomas Hardy as a lyrical poet, beginning with the surprise reception of *Wessex Poems* around Christmas 1898, when admirers expecting a new novel instead received a thick volume of verse. Gosse insists on Hardy's complete independence as a poet apart from his novels, noting that Hardy was nearly sixty when this first collection appeared, following an unbroken novel-writing career from *Desperate Remedies* (1871) to *The Well-Beloved* (1897). Gosse traces the origins of Hardy's poetic vocation to 1865–1867, arguing that Hardy's early verse already displayed his mature qualities: insight into rustic character, a sense of "crass casualty" governing human life (as in "Hap"), and difficult, compressed diction, as in "At a Bridal" and the sonnet sequence "She to Him." He situates Hardy as a poet ahead of his time, working in obscurity alongside Swinburne's revolt against Victorian optimism, though the two were unknown to each other in 1866. Gosse notes Leslie Stephen's role in dissuading Hardy from returning to verse in the 1870s, steering him instead toward *The Return of the Native*, and records Coventry Patmore's 1875 letter praising Hardy's prose while regretting it was not verse. He also traces the germ of *The Dynasts* to an 1875 notebook entry proposing "An Iliad of Europe from 1789 to 1815," and describes how many Wessex ballads, such as "The Fire at Tranter Sweatley's," "Leipzig," and "San Sebastian," were begun decades before completion. The essay then surveys Hardy's successive volumes: *Wessex Poems* (1898); *Poems of the Past and Present* (1902), including Napoleonic pieces, Boer War poems, Roman poems, and metaphysical verse such as "The Darkling Thrush" and "On a Fine Morning"; *Time's Laughingstocks*, with "The Revisitation," "Reminiscences of a Dancing Man," "The Tramp Woman," "A Sunday Morning's Tragedy," and church-choir pieces like "The Dead Quire"; *Satires of Circumstance*, marked by sardonic disillusion, including "The Newcomer's Wife"; and *Moments of Vision*, showing recovered spirit and minute, delicate observation, illustrated by the poem beginning "I idly cut a parsley stalk." Gosse defends Hardy's prosody against charges of incorrectness, acknowledging occasional harshness (e.g., "Fused from its separateness by ecstasy") but praising his inventive stanzaic forms, citing "The Bullfinches," "Lizbie Browne," "Tess's Lament," "Cicely," "Friends Beyond," "Valenciennes," and "The Souls of the Slain" as examples of form matched to subject. He characterizes Hardy's worldview as genuine pessimism—man abandoned by God, scorned by Nature, subject to "purblind Doomsters"—distinguishing it from egotistic romantic melancholy and comparing Hardy to George Crabbe, though Hardy lacks Crabbe's moralizing intent. He discusses Hardy's rejection of consoling Nature, illustrated by "In a Wood" and "Yell'ham-Wood's Story," and his focus instead on human companionship amid shared suffering. Gosse examines Hardy's sympathetic, unmoralizing treatment of rustic and fallen figures ("Lizbie Browne," "The Ruined Maid," "A Wife and Another," "To an Unborn Pauper Child," "Julie-Jane"), his gift for making poetry from minute, seemingly trivial observations, and his ballads of conscience and instinct such as "My Cicely," "The Curate's Kindness," "The Rash Bride," "The Sacrilege," "The Two Men," "The Home-coming," "Rose-Ann," "The Casterbridge Captains," and "The Alarm," many drawn from stories Hardy's grandmother told him of eighteenth-century Wessex. The essay also addresses Hardy's military poems, including "The Man he Killed" and the *Poems of War and Patriotism*, and his treatment of death and memory as forms of surviving only in the recollection of the living, discussed through "The To-be-Forgotten," "The Superseded," "Friends Beyond," "The Souls of the Slain," and "The Mother Mourns." Gosse closes by briefly gesturing toward *The Dynasts* as Hardy's major dramatic work, though he notes it lies mostly outside the scope of a study of lyric poetry, and reaffirms Hardy's fifty-year consistency of vision and his fidelity to the local, particular life of Wessex rather than abstraction.

By Edmund Gosse · First published 1896 · Genre: Poetry, Literary Criticism, Biography · 9,353 words

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When, about Christmas time in 1898, Mr. Hardy's admirers, who were expecting from him a new novel, received instead a thick volume of verse, there was mingled with their sympathy and respect a little disappointment and a great failure in apprehension. Those who were not rude enough to suggest that a cobbler should stick to his last, reminded one another that many novelists had sought relaxation by trifling with the Muses. Thackeray had published _Ballads_, and George Eliot had expatiated in a _Legend of Jubal_. No one thought the worse of _Coningsby_ because its author had produced a _Revolutionary Epic_. It took some time for even intelligent criticism to see that the new _Wessex Poems_ did not fall into this accidental category, and still, after twenty years, there survives a tendency to take the verse of Mr. Hardy, abundant and solid as it has become, as a mere subsidiary and ornamental appendage to his novels.

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Literary Criticism · Poetry Analysis · Victorian Era · English Literature · Lyrical Poetry · Thomas Hardy · 19th Century · British Poetry · Literary Theory · Poetic Style · Romanticism · Modernism

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