Hardy's Poetry

BOOK REVIEWS tion of voices in the wind, Irwin walked up a Dorchester hillside. To his surprise and dismay, he found that the wind drowned out other sounds. Similarly, Irwin remains blind to gender issues, as when he quite unproblematically approves of Hardy's assertion that Stephen should have dragged Elfride to the altar and forced her to marry him. Irwin therefore takes great pains to explain such very basic facts as that it is possible to have different interpretations; that descriptions are valid parts of fiction; that Hardy has a lot of landscape descriptions, and that they serve a purpose. On the other hand, Irwin assumes precisely what would need most proving: that sweeping universalist and humanist pronouncements are appropriate ways to sum up complex texts; that fiction consists only of the elements of character, plot, and background, whose order of importance must be established; and that whatever Hardy says must be read as uncritically and literally true, whether it is a description of wind or an assertion about masculine mastery. In short, this is one man's testimony to a lifetime's appreciation of Thomas Hardy. It is not an intervention in any kind of contemporary critical discourse about Hardy. Reading Hardy's Landscapes places readers in Irwin's classroom—a pleasant space that is best suited to beginning readers of Hardy. TaI ia Schaffer Queens College, CUNY Hardy's Poetry James Persoon. Hardy's Early Poetry: Romanticism through a "Dark Bilberry Eye". Lanham: Lexington Books, 2000. viii + 111 pp. $50.00 THIS STRANGE little book's subtitular quotation is not from Hardy's work, although the eye in question is his, as described by Sir William Rothenstein, who got a close view of it during a portrait sitting: "[Hardy] remarked on the expression of the eyes in the drawing I made—he knew the look, he said, for he was often taken for a detective. He had a small dark bilberry eye which he cocked at you unexpectedly." James Persoon somehow manages to turn this comment into the "fact" that "Hardy in actuality did have two different-appearing eyes," an unsubstantiated claim that, extended into metaphor, is then used to explore Hardy's supposedly split vision. A brief introduction reviews the variously polarised terms adopted by many Hardy critics to define the dualities they find in his work: Hillis Miller's "distance and desire," Harold Bloom's "contrary truths" of head and heart, Tom Paulin's "passive 97 ELT 45 : 1 2002 empiricism and active idealism," et al. Persoon's addition to this list is encapsulated in "my metaphor of the two eyes, one realistic and one romantic___the dark, empirical eye scrutinizing the material world while the other, 'visionary' eye concerns itself with the mystery of the transcendent world." Despite the treacherous porousness of these two key terms, "romantic" and "realistic," they are repetitively advanced throughout this study as a kind of conceptual short-hand, in the apparent faith that in themselves they are adequately definitional of the two poles of Hardy's bifurcated "vision." Persoon elaborates his core idea about Hardy's duality through six chapters. None of them in its own right would be a very substantial article , which explains why in conjunction they do not add up to a particularly convincing book. There is an opening chapter on Hardy's interest in ghosts and the oddly literal form it took as a result of those dualistic romantic /realistic eyes, two chapters on the poems of the 1860s, one on "Hardy's Double Vision of Language," one on "Hardy and Metaphor," and one on "The Question of Hardy's Development." An appendix, with the title "Hardy's Mentors and Kinships, or How a Stonemason's Son Becomes a Poet," wraps things up with a few pages of influence chasing and potted belletristic biography ("Most [Max Gate visitors] could not imagine that the smallish man in an over-large coat who sat before them at tea was really the giant of English letters whose blessing they sought"; "Children were the most disappointing of all. Hardy had none"). Hardy's supposed literary forebears, siblings, and descendants are cursorily enumerated, and seem to comprise a disparate bunch of...