40 - Hardy and Mew

Summary

Victorian versus Modernist

Critics concerned to locate Hardy’s poetry within literary history have often focused on rhythm and metre. Bernard Richards stresses the naturalness of Hardy’s rhythms and his nearness to Modernism: ‘Hardy was evolving the concepts of a poetry that should be based on the rhythms of conversational speech during our [contemporary] period.’ Dennis Taylor, in his influential study, presents Hardy as sharing a Victorian preoccupation with prosodic theory. Likewise, Donald Davie correlates Hardy’s skills as a metrist with Victorian engineering, with ‘the iron bridges and railway stations of engineers like Brunel and Smeaton’. He prefers Hardy’s less dazzling and more irregular works, comparing them to Imagism, to music and to craft as opposed to industry. In all three critics, Victorian and Modernist are starkly opposed and that opposition repeats others: between metre and rhythm, mechanical and natural. Similarly, Davie’s notorious reservations about Hardy’s modesty endorse a literary history favourable to Modernism. Hardy’s work, though, does not respond well to this polarised historical account. He is neither a Modernist who rejects mechanical repetitiousness for ‘moments of vision’, nor is he a failed Modernist who retreats from the high claims of the visionary poet and carries on as a modest artificer of verses. His technical self-awareness and expertise were certainly remarkable but Taylor’s elaborate cataloguing of stanza forms tends to give a distorted impression of extreme contrivance with its contrasting moments of ‘naturalness’.