unchecked. The idea that Shakespeare’s writing is as careless of its effect as
the wind owes more to Romantic conceptions of genius than to any
theatrical sensitivity, but its accuracy matters less than the fact that Hardy
chose here, as elsewhere, to set himself at stylistic odds with the supreme
poet and the poetics associated with him. Hardy’s poetry is the opposite
of the organic and its corollaries of the unity of feeling and thought,
manner and moment. His method instead was to work out ‘verse skel-
etons’, stanzaic patterns with an arbitrary substance that he would use
later as a mould into which to pour his poetic content.^3 An abbreviated
note confirms that this is how he approached the topic from the start of
his writing career:
Lyrical Meth[od] Find a situ[atio]n from exp[erien]ce. Turn to Ly[ri]cs for a
form of express[io]n that has been used for a quite diff[eren]t situ[atio]n. Use it
(Same sit[uatio]n from experience may be sung in sev[era]l forms.)^4
The ‘Studies, Specimens &c’ notebook shows Hardy continually
taking a word or grammatical form and practising variations upon it with
no surrounding poem or context. Such a detached approach to content
then makes the deliberateness of the form more evident; in the stanza
above, for example, ‘Oblivion’ requires a thumpingly full stress on the last
syllable to make the rhyme, whereas in normal speech the final stress is
much more slight, so that the verse-form makes a mockery of the word’s
meaning. In this respect, an admission made in passing to a critic who
accused Hardy of mixing incompatible genres inThe Dynastsis telling.
In arguing that artistic beauty isn’t determined by that art’s own ‘me-
chanical, material or methodic necessities’, but can contain elements
from other arts, Hardy remarked that ‘if we turn to poetry we find that
rhythm and rhyme are a non-necessitous presentation of language under
conditions that in strictness appertain only to music.’^5 That a poem’s
rhythms and rhymes are ‘non-necessitous’ implies a detachable content
decorated – or calumniated – in poetic form.
Such an approach to poetry is heresy for any poet after Samuel
Johnson, never mind Coleridge. Hardy seems to treat poetic form as if
it had no relation to its content; yet, at the same time, the notebooks
reveal a man teaching himself to write with conspicuous ambition and
effort, and no one’s form is more knotted or intricate than Hardy’s. It is
this paradox of caring deeply about not caring that animates not only
his poetry, but his philosophy and his unhappy marriage, and it manifests
itself in a division between form and content which is not accidental,
although it puts him directly at odds with the main current of Romantic
148 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism