Hardy's Importance as Poet

62 REVIEWS 1. Hardy's Importance as Poet Donald Davie. Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (NY: Oxford UP, 1972). Although Thomas Hardy's reputation as a poet has been growing steadily over the past twenty years, we could hardly have anticipated such a study as Donald Davie's Thomas Hardy and British Poetry. Davie claims in his first paragraph that "in British Poetry of the last fifty years (as not in American) the most far-reaching influence, for good and ill, has not been Yeats, still less Eliot or Pound, not Lawrence, but Hardy." The initial scepticism raised by this unprecedented claim, though bElanced by our confidence in Davie's qualifications as a valued poet and superb student of modern poetry, remains unallayed at the end of Davie's study. Nevertheless, though Davie does not substantiate adequately his attributions of influence, he does provide us with two of the best chapters yet written on Hardy's poetry; and for this vie are gratefully in his debt. Davie's book, as its title suggests, has two main interests: a discussion of the poetry of Hardy and its influence upon British poets up to the present time. The first sections, "Introduction ," "Hardy as Technician," and "Hardy Self-Excelling" are the most satisfactory. Davie finds Hardy's chief strength - and limitation - in his mistrust of "the claims of poetry to transcend the linear unrolling of recorded time." It is Hardy's fidelity to the reality of every day, the unchallengeably "given" and final reality, that Davie finds so attractive and, curiously, politically responsible. Davie acknowledges Hardy's "cop-out," his unwillingness to claim for poetry, as Eliot and Pound and Yeats do, the traditional office of displacing or transforming the everyday experience by creating a superior reality by which to judge and govern the quotidian reality. It is the contention of this book that Hardy's tacit acceptance of a limited function for poetry implies certain political and social assumptions that remain viable as a working ethic in the second half of the twentieth century. Davie makes an interesting case for Hardy's determined curtailment of his liberties as poet; contrarily, Davie's arguments about the "political implications" of such curtailment reveal only that, in Hardy's poems, politics is rarely a central issue. More importantly, Davie establishes the intellectual respectability of Hardy's "scientific humanism." A passage from the "Apology " to Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922) is taker to epitomize Hardy's position: that "loving-kindness, operating through scientific knowledge" should be the chief motive of man's actions. Davie buttresses this scientific humanism by referring, as Hardy did himself, to the authority of Wordsworth, who welcomed science into the domain of poetry in his "Preface" to the Lyrical Ballads, and Arnold, who sought in poetry an application of ideas to life. 63 Davie insists finally that Hardy's scientific humanism influences not as a set of propositions but as an attitude informing his practice of his art. The actual nature of Hardy's influence is described in terms of "an apparent meanness of spirit, painful modesty of intention, extremely limited objectives." That these features of later British poetry baffle and offend readers Davie is quite willing to admit. But he attempts to vindicate them by contrasting the example of the Hardyesque poets with the political irresponsibility of "those other poets" Yeats, Pound, Graves, and Lawrence. Turning to Hardy the technician, Davie asserts that Hardy's greatness is in the incomparable force with which his imagination grasped the "essential nature and life style of late-Victorian England, an England which rested on mechanical technology, on heavy engineering." Rather than treating Hardy as a naive provincial , Davie describes him as an oversophisticated artist whose learning often imposed upon his poetic materials by forcing them into predetermined forms. For Davie's Hardy, frequently the Victorian engineer pursuing upper-mobility as a disciple of Samuel Smiles' doctrine of self-help, the chief aesthetic influences are Pugin and Ruskin on Gothic architecture. Most valuably , Davie judges Hardy's poems on strictly artistic bases, even those he recognizes might be founded on Hardy's life. This is a bracing and most encouraging aspect of the book. Thus...