Essays on Hardy

ELT 39:2 1996 tion through his peculiar use of language. That messenger knew this— perhaps had been trained to it—when he came to the door of my aunt to tell her her airman-son was lost. Fifty years later, the survivors of that moment still speak of that messenger's way of giving the news, his intimate knowledge of the dead man, his thoughtfulness in preserving and bringing back to us certain possessions ("just those Tony would have wanted us to have, especially the Rosary," my aunt always said), as well as of the devastating finality of the message. And it helped immeasurably somehow to be told by a messenger in uniform, by one who served. Hardy was one who took notice of small, potentially revelatory things because he understood their importance in conveying his simple and overwhelming message: irretrievable loss. That he did not want to be the bearer of such news is a measure of both his humanity and of the motive behind the enormous painstaking that Mallett and Draper's contributors document so carefully in Hardy's writing. The arrangement of words on the page, the arrangement of poems in a volume of selected poems, the meticulous uses of reading, the use of childhood experiences —the care he took with all these things, and more, served his need to give the bad news directly, tenderly, credibly. And of course Hardy is always in uniform. Peter Casagrande University of Kansas Essays on Hardy Harold Orel, ed. Critical Essays on Hardy's Poetry. New York: G. K. Hall. 1995. 183 pp. $49.00 IN HIS PREFATORY NOTE Zack Bowen, General Editor of the series Critical Essays on British Literature to which this volume belongs , unintentionally points to a possible deficiency of Professor Orel's collection. He notes that The formats of the volumes in the series vary with the thematic designs of individual editors, and the nature of published criticism, augmented, where appropriate, by original essays by recognized authorities." In the present volume there are none of the latter. While this is not in itself a fault, commissioning a few essays could have helped redress an imbalance in the collection. The essays reprinted here cannot be said to represent a very wide range, ethnically or generically speaking, of criticism of Hardy's poetry. Why are there no essays by women or by third-world critics? Or for that matter why restrict coverage to criticism of Hardy's poetry published 244 BOOK REVIEWS between roughly 1976 and 1991? Good as many of the pieces certainly are, readers who keep up with recent Hardy criticism will know them all already. And for those readers for whom some or even several of the essays are new, the collection is likely to seem rather bland, lacking the spice of dissenting voices which occasionally the critical community has learned to prize in the past two decades. It is a pity, for example, that a chapter from Katherine Kearney Maynard's book Thomas Hardy's Tragic Poetry: The Lyrics and "The Dynasts" (1991) could not have been included. That said, the collection does present a cross-section of mainline criticism of Hardy's controversial poetic achievement by some of the bestknown Hardy editors and critics of the post-modernist era. The book has three major divisions: 1. "Hardy and the Art of Poetry" consists of essays by Tom Paulin, Observations of Fact" from his Thomas Hardy: the Poetry of Perception; Geoffrey Harvey, Thomas Hardy: Moments of Vision" from The Romantic Tradition in Modern English Poetry/ Rhetoric and Experience·, William H. Pritchard, "Hardy's Winter Words" from The Hudson Review; and Samuel Hynes, "On Hardy's Badnesses" from Essays on Aesthetics. 2. "Hardy and Other Poets" includes Frank B. Pinion's essay The Influence of Shelley" from Thomas Hardy: Art and Thought and James Persoon's "Dover Beach,' Hardy's Version" from Victorian Newsletter. 3. "A Closer Look at Specific Texts" has Paul Zietlow, "Ballads and Narratives" from Moments of Vision: The Poetry of Thomas Hardy; Vern B. Lentz, "Disembodied Voices in Hardy's Shorter Poems" from Colby Library Quarterly; U. C. Knoepflmacher, "Hardy Ruins: Female Space and Male Designs" from PMLA; and Kenneth...