‘graver things...braver things’ Current work to reclaimTheDynasts, and the broader effort to draw attention to
previously neglected parts of Hardy’s output, have gradually made it more difficult
simply to disparage or set aside his interest in war.^2 Particularly between the late
1890s and the end of the First World War—betweenWessex Poems(1898) and
Moments of Vision(1917)—he became visibly preoccupied with contemporary and
historical wars.Moments of Visionincludes ‘Poems of War and Patriotism’;Poems of
the Past and the Present(1901), his second collection, has a sequence entitled ‘War
Poems’; and inWessex Poems, there are several Napoleonic pieces—‘Valenciennes’,
‘San Sebastian’, ‘Leipzig’, ‘The Peasant’s Confession’, ‘The Alarm’, plus at one
remove ‘The Dance at the Phoenix’. In the same collection, ‘The Casterbridge
Captains’ arises out of the North-West Frontier wars of the mid-nineteenth
century, and, in total, nearly one-third of the book could be defined as war poetry.
Similarly,The Dynaststakes up almost all of two volumes in the five-volume edition
of theComplete Poetical Works.^3
If the received idea of Hardy does not sit comfortably with his production of so
much war poetry, neither do his war poems conform to what is expected of the
genre. Typically (and this is to generalize), the best war poetry is seen as arising out
of the grand disillusion of the First World War. Paul Fussell’s influentialThe Great
War and Modern Memory(1975) reinforced this narrative, in which the horrors of
the trenches, and especially the Somme, shattered belief in England’s cause, creating
at once bitterness and nostalgia. Sassoon’s contempt for the officer class, Owen’s
pity for friend and foe alike, and Edward Thomas’s hesitant but resolute attachment
to the English countryside, all variously condemn Rupert Brooke’s overwrought
ardourforself-sacrifice.Brooke’s1914sonnetsmaybeviewedasgenuinelyidealistic,
as co-opted by the Establishment or as opportunistic themselves; whichever position
is taken, the war’s progress (through fervour, catastrophe, and attrition towards
exhaustion and a victory finally achieved by new and unheroic tactics) is seen
repeating itself in a poetic development from empty-headed enthusiasm towards
the grittier, battle-weary wisdom of the true war poets. That development neatly
aligns itself with the replacement of the patriotic and imperial delusions of the
Victorian world by the sober realism of modernity.
(^2) For recent considerations ofThe Dynasts, see G. Glen Wickens,Thomas Hardy, Monism, and the
Carnival Tradition: The One and the Many inThe Dynasts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2002), and Charles Lock, ‘Hardy Promises:The Dynastsand the Epic of Imperialism’, in Charles
P. C. Pettit (ed.),Reading Thomas Hardy(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 83–116. Examples of work
on neglected parts of Hardy’sœuvreinclude Peter Widdowson,Hardy in History: A Study in Literary
Sociology(London: Routledge, 1989); Joe Fisher,The Hidden Hardy(London: Macmillan, 1992);
Roger Ebbatson,Hardy:TheMarginoftheUnexpressed(Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993); and
M. R. Higgonet (ed.),The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy(Urbana, Ill.: University of
Illinois Press, 1993).
(^3) Thomas Hardy,The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy,5vols.,ed.SamuelHynes(Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1982–95).