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223 TRENDS IN CRITICAL VIEWS TOWARD HARDY'S POETRY By Harold Orel (The University of Kansas) The fact that Hardy's reputation as an artist and thinker has been rising is no news to teachers of the Victorian or modern novel; it has become increasingly difficult to believe in any cheerful view of the universe, and undergraduates who may object to this or that defect in a given novel are still apt to agree with Hardy's somber assessment of life's possibilities. But much of the poetry is still under a cloud, perhaps because critics have insisted ever since the publication of Wessex Poems that what is permissible in dramatic and narrative form Is much too bleak for lyric poetry (a position which ironically inverts Hardy's fond hope that what he could not say in novels might be said freely, and without censure, in his poems). The following review of some Important statements about Hardy's poetical talent concentrates on books devoted wholly to Hardy (and not all of them at that), and attempts to define the current stage of appreciation reached by many critics since World War II. We may begin with three important statements made within the past decade by Hynes, Miller, and Bailey. Samuel Hynes's thesis, contained in The Pattern of Hardy's Poetry (I96I), may be reduced to a simple form: the basic pattern of Hardy's poetry is a principle of structures "thesis (usually a circumstance commonly accepted as good - marriage, youth, young love, the reunion of husband and wife) is set against antithesis (infidelity, age, death, separation) to form an ironic complex , which is left unresolved." Antinomialism of this kind, as Hynes readily admits, is most apparent in the heavily or explicitly ironic poems, and much of the book is devoted to intelligent analyses of poems that either sustain or fail to sustain the necessary tension that an appearance-vs.-reality conflict should generate in the poet's mind. Unfortunately, Hynes rides his hobby-horse hard, and assumes that his major task is to define the reasons why earlier generations of critics have censured Hardy when he might well be pointing out that these critics were often perpetuating stereotypes that had little to do with the poems themselves. Hynes takes as a given, for example, the notion that Hardy has a "severely limited range of tone and ideas," and that the more than 9OO poems are "monotonous." Hardy warned his readers to pay attention to his mood-mixing, and hoped for "right note-catching." Hynes's "general impression" of "ironic tone and obsessive ideas" is not borne out by a close examination of the contents of any single volume, and if one is hostile to the philosophy, his Judgment of the literary quality of the poems will Inevitably be affected. Moreover, the objections to Hardy's diction are not statistically based, despite the carping of Henry James, T.L.S.. and P. R. Leavls; Elizabeth Hlckson's count of unusual words In Hardy's poetry Is not excessive If we consider the size of the canon. Hynes finally comes round to praise of Hardy's fidelity to Life, which sounds as if he has reached an appreciation of the philosophical concepts that Hardy, a "relatively untrained mind," was "continually" poeticizing. That fidelity is characterized as unflinching, clear in vision, and highly personal. Hynes sounds carping (and suspected that 224 he did sound that way), and since the writing of his splendid study of the transitional period I88O-I920 - The Edwardian Turn of Mind (1968) - might want to add a postscript to any reprinting öT this Hardy study; Hardy's intellectual position was not only representative of a very large body of informed opinion in its own time, but still commands respectful attention today. J. Hillls Miller, in Thomas Hardys Distance and Desire (1970), is primarily concerned with Hardy's ideas, though some important critical conclusions may be drawn from his analysis. The book moves on a fairly high level of abstraction (no close readings of individual poems, for example). Miller stresses a "detachment of consciousness which is fundamental to Hardy's way of looking at the world," but Hardy Is also...

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