Thomas Hardy at PPS

 I wouldn't go as far as to say it was one of the events of the local literary calendar round these parts but once a year Portsmouth Poetry Society are treated to a meeting on a subject that is introduced by me. On this year's programme the subject is Thomas Hardy that I pick-pocketed from somedody else's suggestion much in the style of Autolycus. The meeting is on Weds 1 Feb as per here,

PPS programme 

so please come if you can. I've sent out the introduction below so that we can go without me reading it out at the start so you are entirely 'up to speed',

 

Thomas Hardy published his first collection of poems, Wessex Poems, in 1898 at the age of 58. The following year, W.B. Yeats published his third, The Wind Among the Reeds, aged 34. They were similar books in some ways – traditional and backward-looking, Yeats coming to the end of his early, mystical, ‘Celtic Twilight’ period and Hardy, as evidenced in essays by Geoffrey Grigson and Thom Gunn, going back to something like the ballad tradition and with some kinship with the Dorset dialect poet, William Barnes, who died in 1886.

The early poems of Yeats had included such quaintness as The Lake Isle of Innisfree and the 1899 collection featured He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven (‘tread softly because you tread on my dreams’) but whereas he was soon to take the ‘high road’ to the more rigorous Modernism of Ezra Pound and Byzantium, Hardy stayed on the ‘low road’ of mainstream, coherent tradition and did old-fashioned things well for the next thirty years.

Hardy had written poems unsuccessfully in the 1860’s but since then had produced a series of very successful novels but was dismayed by the critical reception of Jude the Obscure, published in 1895. His stories had been increasingly progressive but finally the Bishop of Wakefield announced that he had burnt his copy amongst others who took exception to its anti-religious theme. Hardy had always wanted to write poems but had earned a living by fiction.

As well as their fateful, deterministic plots, Hardy’s novels featured a number of strong, independent and sympathetically-treated female characters like Bathsheba Everdene in Far from the Madding Crowd, Eustacia Vye in The Return of the Native, Tess and, finally, Sue Bridehead in Jude. But he didn’t translate this sympathy from his work into his life. Emma, his first wife who helped him in his work, was aggrieved by the assistance he offered other women writers without doing the same for her. His second wife, Florence, 39 years younger than him, was a hero-worshipper who pursued Hardy in the same way that Valerie Fletcher had become T.S. Eliot’s second wife and, if we must, Gary Numan married the secretary of his fan club, but she never loved Hardy.

A major theme in Hardy’s work is the regret he felt after Emma’s death, as in The Voice (‘Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me’). After his death in 1938, Hardy’s heart was buried in Stinsford churchyard with Emma while his ashes were interred in Westminster Abbey, and Florence was later buried in Stinsford. But however vivid and powerful his work had been, reports like those of Robert Louis Stevenson’s wife, after visiting in 1885, describe a ‘pale, gentle, frightened little man’ and ‘a quite pathetic figure’.

Hardy also provides anthology pieces like Channel Firing and Drummer Hodge on World War 1 but his poetry is often marked by ideas of separation. In The Impercipient, he cannot feel involved in a church service,

That from this bright believing band
An outcast I should be,
That faiths by which my comrades stand
Seem fantasies to me,
And mirage-mists their Shining Land,
Is a drear destiny.

And in Her Definition, he feels ‘debarred’ from Emma’s maiden name. But, as he explains in an introductory note to Winter Words, the collection eventually published posthumously,

My last volume of poems was pronounced wholly gloomy and pessimistic by reviewers…My sense of the oddity of this verdict may be imagined when, in selecting them, I had been, I thought, rather too liberal in admitting flippant, not to say farcical, pieces

And he has a point because there is usually a light in the darkness, as represented by the Darkling Thrush and a poem like For Life I Had Never Cared Greatly, in which,

      With symphonies soft and sweet colour
           It courted me then,
          Till evasions seemed wrong,
      Till evasions gave in to its song,
And I warmed, until living aloofly loomed duller
           Than life among men.

which has a great musicality and life.

The ‘negative constructions’ of ‘impercipient’ and ‘debarred’ recur throughout his work, significantly indicating the lack of connection he feels but it is not complete alienation.

In Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves mentions visiting Hardy who asked if he ‘wrote easily’, in reply Hardy said that he rarely went through more than three drafts of a poem, four at most, and that although he had written novels ‘by a timetable’,

poetry always came to him by accident, which was perhaps why he prized it so highly.

The 14 novels, plus short stories, the 947 poems in The Complete Poems and the huge verse drama, The Dynasts, about the Napoleonic Wars, represent an enormous output but he was an architect as well.

A photograph of Philip Larkin looking at plans for his new university library at Hull prompts a list of just how many parallels there are between Hardy and the later poet who became the mature Larkin once he found a soulmate in Hardy rather than his first poems in the style of Auden and then Yeats. It is in those negative constructions, the religious doubt in Church Going, the awkward, selfish relationships with women and a coherent, common sense poetry that takes so little from the Modernism of Eliot and Pound. Even down to the detail that they both rode round their local countryside on bikes.

In 1926, Hardy is quoted as saying, ‘I’m afraid poetry is giving me up’, which Larkin said, too, whether or not consciously citing his mentor.

Dr. Johnson wrote that,

It is not difficult to conceive…that for many reasons a man writes much better than he lives.

Hardy wasn’t the only one. Forty years ago, and more, the proper object of study in Eng. Lit. was the work, to the exclusion of any reference to the author, for a certain sort of purist. That has changed since then but it is to be hoped that we can still differentiate between the author and their work and, if necessary, admire one if not the other.