Hardy's Poetry

325 Uickens' beginnings as a journalist that were set down by E. Kay Robinson, Kipling's first editor. These attractive volumes, usefully annotated and well indexed, supplement the Kipling biographies, make accessible some material in sources often difficult to locate, and provide some memorable glimpses of a remarkable personality and a seriously underrated writer. Both the man and the author, and both the public and the private figures, are represented; and the reader will not quickly forget such vignettes as that of the short Kipling incongruously paired off with the tall Shaw among the pall-bearers at Hardy's funeral, or such enlightening passages as Florence Macdonald's account of Kipling composing a poem: When composing verse he would often set it to a tune, usually to a hymn-tune, and I have heard him walking up and down the room singing a verse over and over again in order to get the lilt and swing of it. Sometimes he would ask me to sing some poem to a hymn tune that he suggested —for instance "Mc Andrew's Hymn" to "The Church's Une Foundation," or the "Recessional" to the tune "For Those in Peril on the Sea." (p. 19) Norman Page University of Alberta 2. HARDY'S POETRY Thomas Hardy. The Complete Poetical Volume I. Wessex Poems, Poems of ___ Works of Thomas Hardy. the Past and the Present, Time's LaugTii ngstocks. Univ. Press, 1983. $T9. 50 Samuel Hynes, ed. Oxford: Oxford All students ot Hardy will be delighted by this thoughtfully designed, splendidly printed book. The prominence of the poem on the page is one indication of careful planning. The editorial apparatus is unobtrusive; there are no numbers assigned to the poems (which are titled as Hardy wished), line numbering is kept to a minimum, and the notes are inconspicuous. The overall effect is of an edition which equals the best in typography, design and illustration which Hardy experienced in his lifetime. The book is chiefly of interest to Hardy scholars as a critical edition, providing texts of the poems which reflect Hardy's matured intentions and the critical aids to enable the scholar to trace the evolution of the poems. Here too, the book is distinguished. In the future, anyone writing seriously on Hardy's poetry will have to use this edition. One of its salutary effects should be to finish the demolition of the traditional view of Hardy as a packrat— indiscriminately gathering new poems and old, with little or no careful revision, to produce his seven verse volumes, and numerous collected editions, in his lifetime. The reader is now in a position to judge the Tightness of the observation in 326 the Li fe (was it made by Florence Emily, as Hynes avers, or by Thomas Hardy?) concerning Hardy's "artistic inability to rest content with anything he wrote until he had brought the expression as near to his thought as language would allow." In the case of the poems, as may be judged by comparing the recastings of W. H. Auden and W. B. Yeats with Hardy's, his emendations and editing (cancelling whole poems and/or drastically rewriting earlier versions or even recomposing sections of a poem) were only occasionally severe. As we can now see, Hardy tended to be respectful of the original form and language the poem assumed on paper. Though he might revise a poem a dozen times or more, we still easily recognize the Orpoem in the one last published before his death. Given the paucity of manuscript evidence, however, the foregoing is a risky generalization, especially if applied to that body of poems from Hardy's youth that were first published in Wessex Poems and the later volumes. Take "Neutral Poems" for example. The ϕ o em is dated 186 7, but whether this refers to "that winter day" or the date of composition is unclear. In any case Hardy returned to it for over fifty years, making changes from time to time, but the holograph version is very close to the version usually printed. From the evidence of the evolution of many later poems Hynes charts, though we cannot know how Hardy noted down that overflow...