Life-Lyrics: Autobiography, Poetic Form, and Personal Loss in Hardy’s Moments of Vision

In 1951 Edmund Blunden, writing in response to C. Day Lewis’ Wharton Lecture at Oxford on “The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy,” coined the compound term “life-lyric” to capture an apparent paradox at the heart of Hardy’s poetry. Day Lewis had argued in his lecture that Hardy’s was a “deeply, nakedly personal” poetry, hence “seldom pure” as lyric but “nearly always clouded by personal experience; . . . even when a poem seems to be a pure distillation, it almost certainly had its sources in some real incident or flesh-and-blood person.”¹ Are we therefore to read Hardy’s poems, Blunden mused, as “the chronicle of a single life in lyrical ‘annotations’”? Should we “look upon [them] . . . as on the whole a biographical series?” (p. 373). Surely, he reasoned, any explicitly autobiographical project would necessarily be at odds with the impulse of lyric poetry to transmute the personal into the impersonal: to submit the poet’s desire for the representation of lived experience—of the self, and of one’s family, neighbors, and friends, and loved ones—to “the formal order of poetry,” as Jonathan Culler has it, where “I” and “you” are finally only “poetic constructs”?²

When Blunden was asking himself these questions, T. S. Eliot’s modernist poetics were still highly influential and Hardy’s place in the lyric tradition still unclear. Eliot had argued in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) that a poem contains significant emotion only when that emotion is distanced from the poet’s affective life and personality: when the “emotion . . . has its life in the poem.”³ Poets should therefore aspire to the “extinction” of personal feeling, the subordination of human emotion to aesthetic emotion with its deep history of shared conventions, tropes, and forms. At that time, too, Robert Lowell’s revolutionary autobiographical Life Studies was still nearly a decade away, and modernism remained largely committed to purging poetry of what Charles Olson had called the “lyrical interference of the individual.”⁴ To claim that a poet’s work was in some way essentially autobiographical, therefore, as Day Lewis did, made it sound (to borrow Paul de Man’s words) “slightly disreputable and self-indulgent in a way that may be symptomatic of [autobiography’s] incompatibility with the monumental dignity of aesthetic values.”⁵

The tension between aesthetic value and the value of authentic self-expression, with its qualities of sincerity and emotional intensity, is central to Romantic and post-Romantic poetics. For Wordsworth, the exemplar of the poetic autobiographer, a work like The Prelude could never be merely autobiographical or it would relinquish its integrity and power as one of the most profound meditations on the nature of memory and poetic consciousness. Indeed, to call it a poetic autobiography at all is to risk the charge of “heresy,” as James Olney remarks,⁶ and Wordsworth himself was so uncomfortable with the imputation of an epic self-absorption that he never published the poem or even gave it a title, remarking nervously that it was “a thing unprecedented in Literary history that a man should talk so much about himself.”⁷ In the second half of the twentieth century, too, when lyric poets began writing openly about their lives once more, the same tension resurfaced. After reading Life Studies Elizabeth Bishop admitted to her close friend Lowell that she thought the poems in his collection had an “egocentricity” that was “—what would be the reverse of sublimated, I wonder?—anyway, made intensely interesting, and painfully applicable to every reader.”⁸ This is tactfully worded praise from a scrupulously impersonal poet who will not permit herself to say directly that poetic form should, precisely, sublimate the egregious self-centerdness of the confessional poet: transmute it, that is, into something which is to be higher and implicitly more refined if it is to be applicable to every reader.

Yet when readers are explicitly invited “to connect the words on the page with the actual lived experience of the author,”⁹ as they often are in Hardy’s poetry, there is...