Thomas Hardy and the Impersonal Lyric

This essay explores Thomas Hardy's strategies for generating lyric emotion through the vehicle of abstraction, rather than through identification with immediate personal experience. Looking at a number of poems that reflect on the dynamics of knowledge and perspective, it shows that Hardy's skeptical outlook leads him to define an unusual relationship in his poems between knowledge and experience—one that undermines Romantic models and anticipates a modernist tradition to which Hardy is often understood to be opposed.