The Bright Book of Life by Harold Bloom

I HAVE BEEN READING Thomas Hardy since I was about fifteen. The first two of his novels I sank into were The Return of the Native (1878) and The Woodlanders (1887). They are far from being the best of his fictions: those would have to include Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895), which was so viciously received that Hardy, in revulsion, turned back from writing novels to composing poetry, which had started his career. Hardy died in 1928, at the age of eighty-seven. There are not many English poets of the twentieth century who are Hardy's equals: setting aside Yeats and Seamus Heaney as Irish, and Eliot as American, they might include D. H. Lawrence, Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen, the early W. H. Auden, Keith Douglas, and Geoffrey Hill.

As a novelist Hardy was influenced by George Eliot, but his authentic precursor was the High Romantic lyric poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who had a tragic vision of Eros. This prevails throughout Hardy and is felt particularly in his most vivid heroines: Bathsheba Everdene, Eustacia Vye, Marty South, Tess Durbeyfield, Sue Bridehead. In Shelley the shadow of selfhood always falls between desire and its fulfillment. For him love and the means of love, good and the means of good, were irreconcilable.