A Comprehensive Guide to Hardy's Poetry

303 REVIEWS 1. A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO HARDY'S POETRY J. O. Bailey, The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Handbook and Commentary . Chapel Hill, N.C: The University of North Carolina P, 1970. Ü5.00. Of the enormous amount of publication on Thomas Hardy, it is astonishing how relatively little has been produced on his poetry. To be sure. The Dynasts has had the benefit of some exceptionally diligent and perspicacious scholarship - not only in the recent studies by Harold Orel and Walter F. Wright, but also in J. 0. Bailey's own work which appeared in 1956. Otherwise, however, significant book-length studies of Hardy's poetry are scant: Hickson's in 1931, Southworth's in 1947, Hynes· in I96I, and most recently, Kenneth Marsden's The Poems of Thomas Hardy in I969. One reason for this neglect is probably that Hardy's poetry is curiously resistant to the modes of critical discourse which have tended to predominate in the last forty years. Another, however, is that there is often an absence of the kinds of information about the background of Hardy's poems needed to make confident critical discussion possible. For Hardy's poetry, in spite of the apparent simplicity of so much of it, has been more desperately in need of a gloss than has been generally recognized. It is safe to say that the remark in The Later Years to the effect that "there is more autobiography in a hundred lines of Mr. Hardy's poetry than in all the novels" has been taken by most readers as one of those casual assertions which are not to be credited seriously. Professor Bailey's The Poetry of Thomas Hardy now amply demonstrates that the assertion is to be carefully heeded indeed. The importance of the kinds of information Professor Bailey provides is clearly evident if one compares the attempt of an excellent critic like J. Hillis Miller to provide a full reading of "Wessex Heights" (Critical Quarterly. X [Winter I968], 339-59) with Bailey's entry for the poem. Such comparisons will make clear, I think, that anyone who wishes to propose a careful reading of one of Hardy's poems cannot afford to overlook Bailey's book. It is an easy book to use. After a preliminary presentation of those facts which form a background to a great many poems, the arrangement of the book is by title of individual poem in an order which follows first that of the Macmlllan (London, I962) Collected Poems, and, thereafter, alphabetically by title, all poems not published in Collected Poems as well as alternate titles of poems treated elsewhere in the volume. There are unexpected dividends in the form of three previously unpublished poems - two of them particularly interesting epitaphs Hardy composed for G. K. Chesterton and George Moore, both of which reveal the bitter intensity of Hardy's resentment over their attacks on him. 304 The kind of thoroughness which would turn up three new items in the Hardy canon is entirely characteristic of the book as a whole. One gets the impression that even the smallest details were given very careful attention. In Bailey's gloss for "Valenciennes ," for example, R. L. Purdy's identification of the unnamed pensioner to whom the poem Is dedicated is carefully reexamined - and qualified - and even the music to which the poem was set for a 1912 performance by the Dorset Debating and Dramatic Society is located. But Professor Bailey's thoroughness extends beyond the limitations one ordinarily attributes to a handbook, for it is, as its sub-title indicates, also a commentary, and it goes well beyond simple matters of fact. For one thing, it is rich in what it supplies of tangential detail: the entry for a poem like "I Look Into My Glass," for example. Includes quotations from a pen-portrait from Later Years. Newman Flower's recollection of Hardy's reflections on the changes wrought by time, and a quotation from The Well Beloved In which Plerston meditates on a theme which parallels that of the poem. Furthermore, in many of the entries Bailey provides citations from the critical comments of other scholars, and, on occasion (see...