Thomas Hardy AO5 (Hugo)

Anonymous on 'At Castle Boterel' immortality

'Hardy's notion of immortality could be considered to be an irreligious one...an expression of faith in humanity and the significance of love'

Anonymous on 'At Castle Boterel' immortality and death

'Hardy's knowledge that without the power of human consciousness invested in his living memory, Emma will no longer be immortal when he is dead'

Anonymous on the definition of 'At Castle Boterel'

'an elegiac journey from grief to acceptance'

Tom Paulin on Hardy's central concerns

'Hardy is the poet and the chronicler of marriage's and love's deceptions'

Tom Paulin on the pause between 'show' and 'Love' in 'To Lizbie Browne'

'quite simply momentous'

Tom Paulin on immortality in 'At Castle Boterel'

'as if some immortal essence still survives'

Tom Paulin on different voices

'the unique, the inscaped cadences of individual voices...the voices of the dead return to life in his lines.'

Anonymous on 'Drummer Hodge' ending

'The poem offers, ultimately, a hopeful conclusion'

Anonymous on 'Drummer Hodge' as a protest poem

'a cry of rage from an angry poet who witnessed the suffering of men in a hostile universe'

Anonymous on the purpose of 'Drummer Hodge'

'The poem is anti-war, drawing our attention to the uncommemorated victims of a senseless conflict'

Julie Cohen on Hardy's use of poetry to communicate his longing for Emma

'Through poetry, Hardy can attempt a reconciliation that he knew to be impossible in life'

Julie Cohen on the dead in Hardy's poetry

'Again and again in Hardy's poems, the dead speak'

Lytton Strachey on Hardy's power to move us

'Hardy's poetry has found out the secret of touching our marrow-bones.'

F R Leavis on Hardy (negative)

'a naive poet of simple attitudes and outlook'

Philip Larkin on what Hardy wrote about

'His subjects are men, the life of men, time and the passing of time, love and the fading of love'

Donald Davie on Hardy as a poet

'Hardy is a poet of loss...and a poet of rural nostalgia'

Geoffrey Harvey on emotion

'the huge emotional charge that his verse contains'

Dennis Taylor on Hardy's language

'Hardy rejected artificial poetic language for the real language of men'

James Richardson on desire/possibility

'Hardy's poetry is an obsessive investigation of desire, and a perpetual elegy on the death of possibility.'

Peter Widdowson on silencing Emma

'Hardy's remorseful lyrical elegies on Emma depend for their poignancy and meaning on the silencing of her voice.'

John Paul Riquelme on spiritual vs human

'Hardy avoids the spiritual, focusing instead on a human world.'

Gettysburg College on Hardy's social critique

'Hardy is often Victorian in his emphasis on the failures of human love and the hypocrisies in the social system of his time'

Ezra Pound on Hardy's poems from 1912-13

'all good, and enough for a lifetime.'

Malcolm Hebron on Hardy telling the truth

'commitment to the truthful and authentic is present in Thomas Hardy's poetry'

Malcolm Hebron on emotion in 'The Darkling Thrush'

'an emotional neutrality'

Laurence Coupe on how Hardy's poetry can't easily be classified into lyric, narrative and dramatic

his poems 'often look like lyrics but have an underlying narrative impetus'

Anonymous on the cruelty of Time in 'At Castle Boterel'

'the cruel indifference of Time and Nature is symbolised in Castle Boterel'

Claire Tomalin on Hardy's lack of faith but desire for belief

'He could no longer believe, but he cherished the memory of belief, and especially the centrality and beauty of Christian ritual in country life.'

Claire Tomalin on Hardy's lack of faith and regret for this in 'The Oxen'

'his lack of faith and his regret for it'

Anonymous on the thrush's action in 'The Darkling Thrush'

the thrush's action is 'a defiant act of affirmation'

Anonymous on the ending moment of the 'The Darkling Thrush'

the thrush's action 'creates a sense of solidarity with all living things.'

Carol Rumens on the lyricism of 'The Darkling Thrush'

'one of Hardy's most lyrical poems'

what did Carol Rumens think the thrush could be?

representative of Hardy himself

Adam Newey on faith in 'The Oxen'

'encapsulates beautifully the urge to faith that

persists even in the face of all better judgement'

Adam Newey on the grown-up speaker's realisation in 'The Oxen'

'the grown man knows that if there is any transcendent power at work in this world it is callously indifferent to human concerns'

Anonymous on time in 'Afterwards'

'time is not seen as a threatening force but as inevitable.'

Allingham on resisting time in 'Afterwards'

'The poem resists the passage of time...there are grounds for seeing this as a quietly optimistic poem.'

Allingham on the speaker's wish in 'Afterwards'

to be remembered as a 'lover of nature'

Anonymous on the certainty in 'Afterwards'

'quiet acceptance of his fate...certainty that he will live on in memories'

Gettysburg College on Hardy and women

'It seems that Hardy truly loves women for their beauty and their mystery, but at the same time detests the power they have over him.'

Claire Tomalin and Hardy himself on Hardy and time

a 'time-torn man'

Anonymous on Emma's nature in 'The Haunter'

'she remains a construction of the poet, an unfulfilled wish'

Donald Davie on Hardy's achievement in 'The Haunter'

an affirmation in which 'love triumphs over time'

Tom Paulin on 'To Lizbie Browne' being possibly problematic

'primal, obsessive, even fetishistic'

Tom Paulin on the tone of 'To Lizbie Browne'

'both tender and self-mocking'

Laurence Coupe on the grief of 'The Voice'

the poem 'conveys the abject state of mourning, the failure of the bereaved soul to find sanctuary from his pain'

Florence Henniker (Hardy's second wife) on the 'Emma' poems

'fictions which he believed to be true'

Claire Tomalin on why Hardy wrote the Emma poems

'He needs to speak to her and see her, although he knows he cannot. The poetry allows him to. It keeps him balanced between the possible and the impossible'

what did the poet become observer to in the 20th century according to some critics? (good for 'The Darkling Thrush' and all Eliot poems)

'an empty, chaotic universe'

Anonymous on the witnesses in 'Afterwards'

'What other people say hardly begins to convey what the living man experienced'