Hardy's Poems Research Articles

Demands of History: Narrative Crisis in Jude the Obscure

For readers of Hardy's poems or novels, the phrasing of history as the twitching of desire is so expected that it earns the status of signature. In this instance, Hardy's Christian God is responding to the pagan who complains of Gothic cathedral erected on the site of her boiling springs. Invoking historical priority, the Goddess implores Jove to remove the Christian temple; and Hardy's God addresses the demand with the sober, resigned account of historical deities as the perpetual?and perpetually unstable?projec tions of desire: we are images both?twitched by people's desires. The impermanence of faith is stressed from the outset, for the recorded exchange is not witnessed (Nothing was seen), but merely over heard, the fading echo of a song men yesterday sang. Compressed in these lines are issues present throughout Hardy's work concerning the demands of history and their consequences: the de mands placed upon history and the demands to historicize. These demands are more than thematic, for they comprise the very problem atic of Hardy's narrative and poetic project.1 The problematic is, moreover, doubly historical: throughout Hardy's work, history functions both as an object of representation and as the condition of representa tion itself. The double demand?and potential double bind?of history is marked in Aquae Sulis by deep uncertainty and ambivalence: the wayward and unpredictable course of desire, the fragility of the past, and the unstable status of the past as aesthetic object, as song. This poetic exchange regarding the status of history and its inscrip tion in physical sites is as emblematic of Hardy's prose as it is his poetry; and it demonstrates that the attention to historical sites'*

The Hardy-Moule Affair With a Reading of Four Hardy Poems

The relationship between the young Thomas Hardy and Horace Moule, whose blighted life ended in suicide in September 1873, has long been shadowed in mystery. Though considerably older than Hardy, Moule was unusually attentive, serving as tutor, literary counselor, and psychological reinforcer during some of the most stressful phases of Hardy's efforts to shape his maturity and realize his ambitions as a writer. Based on the known biographical facts and on a reading of four Hardy poems, this essay suggests that the relationship had a strong, if one-sided, erotic component which was the source of much personal anxiety to Hardy, but which he gradually dealt with in poems that, though very oblique, are impeccably honest.

The First Mrs Thomas Hardy , and: The Second Mrs Hardy (review)

Reviews Denys Kay-Robinson, The First Mrs Thomas Hardy. London: Macmillan , 1979. 278 pp. £7.95. Robert Gittings and Jo Mantón, The Second Mrs Hardy. London: Heinemann; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979. 150 pp. $10.95. The Hardy industry has produced two more books illuminating the life of Thomas Hardy. Denys Kay-Robinson has done a thorough study of Hardy's first marriage through the life of the provocative Emma Lavinia Gifford. Author of books on English counties and of radio plays, he has previously written one of the best Hardy guidebooks, Hardy's Wessex Re-appraised (1972). Robert Gittings and Jo Mantón (Mrs. Gittings) have combined their talents in writing a fine life of Florence Emily Dugdale, the second Mrs. Hardy. Gittings has published a biography of Keats and two volumes on Thomas Hardy; Mantón has written lives of two outstanding women, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first woman doctor in England, and Sister Dora (Dorothy Pattison), the industrial nurse. Jo Manton's understanding of late Victorian women and their position in society is clearly an aid in her work on Mrs. Hardy. There is no evidence of a division of labor in the Gittings' The Second Mrs Hardy, for the subject matter is uniformly handled and the style is direct and clear. Denys Kay-Robinson, in his longer biography, The First Mrs Thomas Hardy, which is in many ways dependent upon the scholarship of Robert Gittings in Young Thomas Hardy (1975) and Thomas Hardy's Later Years (1978), REVIEWS 263 has also produced a scholarly study with a strong defense of Emma Hardy in opposition to those who for years, especially since the work of Carl J. Weber in 1940, have attacked her as the cause of the novelist 's unhappy life. The Gittings' and Kay-Robinson are in agreement in their basic interpretations of the three principals involved: Hardy, Emma, and Florence. Both books reveal careful investigation of sources (using new material in some instances), and both contain indexes , notes of sources, and lists of major works cited. That the KayRobinson book is more than one hundred pages longer than the Gittings ' book is partly dependent on the fact that Hardy's first marriage covered thirty-eight years, while the second was limited to fourteen years. Emma lived to be seventy-two, while Florence survived her husband by only nine years and died at fifty-eight. Also, a great deal of Hardy's autobiographical poetry relates to Emma and very little to Florence; Kay-Robinson quotes scores of passages from Hardy's poems to illustrate his thesis. In his published lectures, The Nature of Biography (1978), given at the University of Washington, Robert Gittings says that "the double biography of a relationship, which throws light on both characters, is a fruitful development of modern life-writing." I wish that he and Jo Mantón had written a "dual biography" of Thomas Hardy's two wives, or that Denys Kay-Robinson had done so. No doubt both biographers knew that the other was writing on a Mrs. Hardy at the same time, and this may well have prevented either from doing a double life. The two lives were published in 1979, but I gather that the Gittings ' life came out first, and it is the only one of the two published in the U.S.A. as well as in England. Kay-Robinson refers to Robert Gittings ' earlier two books on Hardy (but not to this one on Florence) at least twenty-five times, usually in corroboration of his own view but sometimes to correct. Neither Emma Gifford nor Florence Dugdale has ever before had a book-length biography, yet each has long deserved one. Emma was, in her way, a more interesting personality than Florence. There are fascinating parallels, often ironic contrasts, in these two lives. Both women were ambitious to write, but did so unsuccessfully; both were classconscious , though in quite different ways; one was conventionally pious , the other an unbeliever; most important of all—both were married to Thomas Hardy. Not only the parallels are interesting, but the triangulation of these two lives with that of Hardy himself is illuminating : Emma helped...

An Interview with William Stafford

INT: Do you read much contemporary poetry? W.S: do read a lot of contemporary poetry, but it's sort of like nibbling olives or something. INT: Which contemporary poets do you feel some sort of affinity with? W.S: like Thomas Hardy and feel much more affinity with him than with any contemporary poet can think of now ... of course he was almost con temporary ... he died in the late 1920's. Thomas Hardy ... To many he seems kind of pessimistic, but get a kind of feeling of elation out of Hardy . . . you know, if human beings inhabit that kind of world it's not their fault. And besides, just follow his sort of totemistic or feeling of natural influences way of living. INT: You said you liked Hardy by sympathy. recall reading somewhere that you said you liked Yeats, but had no sympathy for him. W.S: Yes, that's true. Yeats seems foreign to me. . . . I'm excited a lot of those violent encounters of images and so on, that he cultivated in his mind, but that kind of recklessness with images for the sake of firework displays in poetry is just foreign to my nature. It's like visiting a quaint and odd per son . . . but read Hardy's poems, keep having that huh-huh, yes feeling. The I understand feeling. INT: When did you first realize that you wanted to become a W.S: I've thought about that, and sort of reversed it. My question is when did other people give up the idea of being a poet? You know, we are kids we make up things, we write, and for me the puzzle is not that some people are still writing, the real question is why did the other people stop? INT: Do you think that getting to know a man through his poems is possible? W.S: It seems to me that poems, and other kinds of art works, are disguises. don't mean deliberate disguises, but they are created following out hunches that are not at all ones that are necessarily central feelings, or durable commitments, but just opportunities. At least write, feel like the kind of person who is ready to try all sorts of things. INT: So you think then that even reading a great deal of a writer may not bring us close to him as a man? W.S: Yes, what we learn is what they've written; but what they are is what they haven't yet written. What they are is sort of why they wrote it. A poem is not a direct revealing of a person. ... In my way of writing I've compared it to Daniel Boone going over into Kentucky and finding things . . . Daniel Boone is not Kentucky . . .