Hardy’s Deep Discordance

Abstract

ABSTRACTWhile Thomas Hardy is acknowledged as a major author of the Victorian period, his poetry is less critically regarded than his novels, and of his poetic subjects, few have been given less attention than animals. Despite this, Hardy’s animal poetry is among his best known and most frequently anthologised, and forms an important part of his poetic corpus. This essay argues that Hardy’s animal poetics require critical attention in part because they have yet to receive it and, in addition, because Hardy’s animal poetics gently force the reader to reckon with discursive traditions that privilege humanity over animality to the detriment of both. Through an analysis of five animal poems this essay suggests that both the image of “good little Thomas Hardy”, as James famously called him, and the more typical view of Hardy as a misanthropic pessimist miss Hardy’s rhetorical use of “deep discordancy” to promote an emergent post-Darwinian posthumanism.