The book’s Introduction addresses the ways in which the notion of crisis functions conceptually to name not only moments of economic and cultural rupture, which become normalized within capitalist modernity, but also moments of epistemological doubt, when the taken-for-granted relationship between language and the social is called into question and subjected to critique. The Depression represented not only a breakdown of the smooth functioning of modernity and its market-based social organization, but also a parallel breakdown in a collective investment in the idea that language can represent the social, as language came to be regarded with suspicion for its role in perpetuating forms of commodification and appropriation associated with a crisis-ridden modernity. In response to this crisis, poetic language was forced to reconfigure its relationship to a society that was itself always in flux. The book’s Introduction thus establishes a basis for its survey of a broad cross-section of the poetic idioms associated with the Depression as both critiques of the idea of market modernity as a progressive, developmentalist force, and efforts to shore up language’s efficacy as a social and cultural form.

This chapter places Thomas Hardy’s writings in the context of the heated arguments that arose between Charles Darwin and his most outspoken adversary, the philologist Max Müller, regarding the relationship between language and thought. While Müller insisted on a close, coeval relationship between the ability to frame ideas and the ability to express those ideas in words, Darwin throughout his writing demonstrates a lively fascination with the diverse and dynamic kinds of thinking that human beings and other animals appear able to perform ‘manifestly without the aid of language’ (Descent of Man, 1871). This chapter argues that Hardy’s writing is centrally concerned with the tragi-comic consequences of a world in which there is both language without thought and thought without language. It begins by exploring Hardy’s responses to these larger concerns in his novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891-2) and concludes by examining his return to this theme in his poetry. The chapter discusses a wide range of Hardy’s poems, from canonical pieces such as ‘The Darkling Thrush’ (1900) to lesser-known works, including the series of short poems that Hardy is believed to have contributed to his second wife Florence Emily Dugdale’s volume for children, The Book of Baby Birds (1912).

Early in Canto IV of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, written when Byron’s wanderings had led him at last to a more settled residence in Italy, he balances all that he has acquired in exile with a new wistfulness about England