Not thinking of you as Left Behind": Virgil and the Missing of Love in Hardy's Poems of 1912–13

"The Missing of Love" locates Hardy's debt to Virgil in the Poems of 1912-13 in the sequence's reprisal of the episode of Aeneas's forgetting to look behind for Creusa in their flight from Troy. By reading both Hardy's and Aeneas's failures to look behind as inversions of Orpheus' fatal failure not to, the paper asks after the good of this negative power to forget, abandon, take for granted, or leave behind, insofar as it becomes a trope for love between poets, and relates to the strangely imperceptive capacity various philosophical and literary traditions have designated as faith or trust.