Wessex, Literary Pilgrims, and Thomas Hardy

Abstract

Poet and Oxford Professor of Poetry, Edmund Blunden, is a key figure in the history of Thomas Hardy’s reception. He kept the Hardy tradition alive between the world wars.1 He was a pilgrim to ‘Wessex’ too, led there at first in 1922 by Siegfried Sassoon. Blunden later explored what was compelling about ‘Wessex,’ arguing that, in Return of the Native, Hardy discovered how the ‘important aspects of his writing could be linked together;’2 ‘the harmony of the whole’, Blunden concluded, ‘came from Hardy’s Wessex scenes and seasons.’ Harmony, of various kinds, is central to much of the comment on and experience of Wessex (by Hardy and others), and it forms an organising concept in this essay.3 But discordant notes are present too, including a deeply felt and always active ambivalence in Hardy towards the whole Wessex project. This ambivalence had its roots in the tensions between Hardy’s ambitions, literary and otherwise, and his background. It was perfectly illustrated, as I will argue here, in the national debate (in which he took part through his will) about where his body belonged after his death. In this essay, then, I assess to what extent Hardy was the happy creator of ‘Wessex,’ himself hooked, along with increasing numbers of reader-pilgrims, by the country the reviewers always said he should not leave.4 I also consider to what extent, and in what ways, he became its victim too.KeywordsActive AmbivalenceNational DebatePublic PersonaPublic VoiceMagazine PublicationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.