Hardy Eliot AO5

An August Midnight

Drummer Hodge - hopeful

‘A hopeful conclusion - ‘Young Hodge’ will ‘reign […] eternally’ amongst the stars’

Drummer Hodge - rage

‘A cry of rage from an angry poet who witnesses the suffering of men in a hostile universe’

The Darkling Thrush - John Carey

‘A new voice at the end of an era’

A Darkling Thrush - R. Carpenter

‘Sharp and clear in its imagery […] harsh and austere in its feelings’

To Lizbie Browne

‘Hardy truly loves women for their beauty and their mystery, but […] detests the power they have over him’

The Haunter - Donald Davie

‘Love triumphs over time’

The Voice - Howard Jacobson

‘[Hardy’s remorse] wasn’t strong enough to allow her to have her say’

At Castle Boterel - elegy

‘A perpetual elegy on the death of possibility’

At Castle Boterel - time

‘Brief human experience set against the melancholic operations of time’

Emma Poems - Claire Tomalin

‘The Emma Poems move between an old man’s sorrow and a young man’s bliss’

Afterwards - quiet

‘A quietly optimistic poem’

The Oxen - Claire Tomlain

‘Muses on his lack of faith and his regret for it […] He cherishes the memory of belief’

Portrait of a Lady - emptiness

‘Emptiness and sterlity of the life of a cultured woman surrounded by ‘bric-a-brac’’

Portrait of a Lady - society

‘social malice […] the speaker is suspended between feelings of attraction and repulsion’

Portrait of a Lady - baffeling

‘wrote about women as baffeling, alien creatures’

Portrait / Prufrock - women

‘viewed women from a literary distance’

Prufrock - desire

‘[Prufrock represents] thwarted desires and modern disillusionment’

Prufrock - Seamus Perry - trap

‘infernal entrapment’

Prufrock - Perry - character symbol

‘an archetype for the ‘complex’ of over-scrupulous timidity’

Prufrock - Clifton

‘[A] failure of masculine identity’

Preludes - acceptance

‘An acceptance of the futility of life and an inability to halt time’

Preludes - despair

‘Sense of despair at the soulnessness of humanity against the backdrop of mass culture’

Preludes - J.C.C. Mays

‘A yearning after significance while significance is withheld’

The Hollow Men - Cooper

‘[Eliot feared] the horror of an existance void of meaning’

The Hollow Men - Eliot

‘A spiritual disease' [is explored]’

Journey of the Magi - Seamus Perry

‘[His] transitional poem’

Journey of the Magi - R. Williams

'an inner shift so deep that you could hardly notice it’