Life-Lyrics: Autobiography, Poetic Form, and Personal Loss in Hardy’s Moments of Vision

Abstract

In 1951 Edmund Blunden, writing in response C. Day Lewis' Wharton Lecture at Oxford on Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy, coined compound term life-lyric capture an apparent paradox at heart of Hardy's poetry. Day Lewis had argued in his lecture that Hardy's was deeply, nakedly hence seldom as lyric but always clouded by personal experience; ... even when poem seems be pure distillation, it almost certainly had its sources in some real incident or flesh-and-blood person. (1) Are we therefore read Hardy's poems, Blunden mused, as the chronicle of single life in 'annotations'? Should we look upon [them] ... as on whole biographical series? (p. 373). Surely, he reasoned, any explicitly autobiographical project would necessarily be at odds with impulse of lyric poetry transmute personal into impersonal: submit poet's desire for representation of lived experience-of self, and of one's family, neighbors, and friends, and loved ones-to the formal order of poetry, as Jonathan Culler has it, where and you are finally only constructs? (2) When Blunden was asking himself these questions, T. S. Eliot's modernist poetics were still highly influential and Hardy's place in lyric tradition still unclear. Eliot had argued in Tradition and Individual Talent (1919) that poem contains significant only when that is distanced from poet's affective life and personality: when emotion ... has its life in poem. (3) Poets should therefore aspire extinction of personal feeling, subordination of human aesthetic with its deep history of shared conventions, tropes, and forms. At that time, too, Robert Lowell's revolutionary autobiographical Life Studies was still nearly decade away, and modernism remained largely committed purging poetry of what Charles Olson had called lyrical interference of individual. (4) To claim that poet's work was in some way essentially autobiographical, therefore, as Day Lewis did, made it sound (to borrow Paul de Man's words) slightly disreputable and self-indulgent in way that may be symptomatic of [autobiography's] incompatibility with monumental dignity of aesthetic values. (5) The tension between aesthetic value and value of authentic self-expression, with its qualities of sincerity and emotional intensity, is central Romantic and post-Romantic poetics. For Wordsworth, exemplar of poetic autobiographer, work like The Prelude could never be merely autobiographical or it would relinquish its integrity and power as one of most profound meditations on nature of memory and poetic consciousness. Indeed, call it poetic autobiography at all is risk charge of heresy, as James Olney remarks, (6) and Wordsworth himself was so uncomfortable with imputation of an epic self-absorption that he never published poem or even gave it title, remarking nervously that it was a thing unprecedented in Literary history that man should talk so much about himself. (7) In second half of twentieth century, too, when lyric poets began writing openly about their lives once more, same tension resurfaced. After reading Life Studies Elizabeth Bishop admitted her close friend Lowell that she thought poems in his collection had an egocentricity that was --what would be reverse of sublimated, I wonder?--anyway, made intensely interesting, and painfully applicable every (8) This is tactfully worded praise from scrupulously impersonal poet who will not permit herself say directly that poetic form should, precisely, sublimate egregious self-centerdness of confessional poet: transmute it, that is, into something which is be higher and implicitly more refined if it is be applicable every reader. Yet when readers are explicitly invited to connect words on page with actual lived experience of author, (9) as they often are in Hardy's there is perceived danger, against which criticism is quick caution, of finding autobiographical situation intensely interesting in itself, and painfully applicable only in so far as it encourages us identify with emotional power of lived experience, not emotional power of aesthetic experience. …