(2000), an anthology arranged by the date of a poem’s first appearance, it comes as
a shock to see among the poems of 1916, immediately preceding T. S. Eliot’s ‘The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, a poem such as ‘The Quiet House’. Mew’s style is
restrained and steady in the old way, but the feeling is raw.
The room is shut where Mother died,
The other rooms are as they were,
The world goes on the same outside,
The sparrows fly across the Square,
The children play as we four did there,
The trees grow green and brown and bare,
The sun shines on the dead Church spire,
And nothing lives here but the fire,
While Father watches from his chair ....One can readily see why Mew was admired by Hardy.
Thomas Hardy, poet
Thomas Hardy,discussed earlier as a novelist on page 317, wrote the most ambitious
Edwardian poetry in The Dynasts (1904, 1906, 1908), an epic verse drama on the
Napoleonic wars, set in various continental theatres and in Wessex, where Bonaparte
was expected to land. There are Choruses of the Spirits of the Years and the Pities,
somewhat as in Greek tragedy and Wagner’s opera. It rewards, but rarely gets, a read-
ing. Its epic historical panorama and lofty viewpoint suggest a comparison with
Pound’s Cantos and Eliot’s The Waste Land; from this Hardy emerges with some
solid qualities. But by common consent his best work is found scattered through the
six volumes from Wessex Poe ms (1898) to Winter Words (1928).He was, as he
modestly boasted, ‘a good hand at a serial’, and his novels will remain popular. But
his one thousand poems represent a more lasting literary achievement.
Hardy, Yeats and Eliot,whose work dominated 20th-century English poetry until
the 1970s,are remarkably different poets. Hardy’s poems, unlike those of Yeats and
Eliot, require no explanatory notes for English readers. The unpretentious Hardy
discouraged theor izers by remarks such as ‘there is no new poetry’, ‘unadjusted
impressions have their value’ and (less convincingly) ‘no harmonious philosophy is
attempted in these pages – or in any bygone pages of mine, for that matter’ (1928).
Hardy did not want to be remembered for the atheist outbursts ofTessand Jude.The
intellectual anxiety left by his loss of faith in the 1860s was not satisfied by the
advanced thinkers he read afterwards. Despite his disclaimers, his poems often
attempt to philosophise, though they are empirical and dramatic experiments, and
miscellaneous rather than systematic. His unadjusted impressions are occasional,
and the collections, apart from the Poems of 1912–13, are unshaped. Many of his
poems were written before 1900, but his style did not change. Although Hardy deep-
ened and strengthened, his work shows little ‘development’. He wrote workmanlike
poems, from ‘Domicilium’ in his teens, to ‘During Wind and Rain’ in his eighties,
hundreds of them excellent. His quality is acknowledged by subsequent poets as
characteristically English. The occasional nature of his poems makes him easier to
anthologize than to write about, though anthologists used too often to choose
poems illustrating Victorian Doubt. But vernacular unpretentiousness should not be
misprized; sketches and watercolours make a strong contribution to English art. In
Helen Gardner’s New Oxford Book of English Verse(1972), only Shakespeare and
POETRY 337