Thomas Hardy and William Barnes: Two Dorset Poets

Abstract

Hardy seems to have reacted negatively to the poetry of William Barnes, his friend and mentor, when it idealized the countryside as the location of a stable, harmonious, divinely sanctioned social order. Such poetry lacked “dramatic form”—contrast within the poem between the limited sphere of the speaker and the larger awareness of the poet. There are nevertheless affinities between the two men: Both venerated the countryside as a relic of the past—as a location sanctified by the meaningful human experience associated with it. If Barnes influenced Hardy positively, it must have been mainly through the loving awareness of the meaning of time and place expressed in his verse. Yet Barnes laments merely the pastness of the past; Hardy explores the radical discontinuity between the idealized past and the real present. Wessex for Hardy represents both an idealized Barnesian world and a real world in which the eternal disparities causing inevitable human suffering can be most clearly observed.