Hardy & Eliot critic's quotes

Eliot poetry/emotion/escape

"Not an expression of emotion but an escape from emotion" TS Eliot

Hardy's connection to real world/present

"writing about a world from which his readers were already exiled" Kirsch

Eliot's connection with real world/present

"The great poet, in writing himself, writes his time" Eliot

Hardy's loss of words

"loss of words to express his feelings" Borade

Hardy's own view of voices/echoes

"In this world there are few voices and many echoes" Hardy

silencing of Emma's voice

"remorse for his wife was famous, but it wasn't strong enough to allow her to have her say" Jackobson

WW1 and individualism

"everyone's individual lives are swallowed up in the one great tragedy, that one almost ceases to have personal experiences or emotions" Eliot

Hardy/loss

"a poet of loss" Davies

Preludes is like a

"sick version of life" Chakraborty

Eliot's place/setting

"Concerned with scenes of urban squalor" Ackroyd

Hardy/the past

"Hardy looks back nostalgically at the past, which to him always seems preferable to the present" Norman

Hardy/nostalgia

"a poet of rural nostalgia" Davies

Hardy/nature

"feels the earth and its roots as if he had sap in His veins instead of blood" Gosse

Portrait of a lady and Prufrock: society

"a character study intended to communicate the mood of a certain social environment" Heiney

setting of Prufrock

"the twentieth century Inferno and Purgatory" Southam

Hardy/society

"Poetry of social engagement and the celebration of the bonds of community" Taylor

the women in Eliot's poems

"Women are imprisoned in their own spheres" Miller

Prufrockian paralysis

"Trapped in his own mind" and " unable to act" Perry

Eliot/the past

"past and present coexist" Chakraborty

Hardy/memory

"obsessive attention to the process of memory" Perkins

Hardy/war/love

"There will always be love and war" Paulin

Eliot/death

"Eliot had a vision of the relationship between the living and the dead" Spender

Eliot and Viv's marriage/unhappiness

"To her, the marriage brought no happiness. To me, it brought the state of mind out of which came The waste Land" Eliot

Eliot's use of classical allusions viewed negatively as

"a full-scale retreat from the present" Wood

similarities between Prufrock and Eliot makes the poem a

"ruthless self mockery" Spurr

Journey of the Magi / change

"the poem explores our essential powerlessness in a changing world" Williamson

Emma's death viewed as

"the moment when Thomas Hardy became a great poet" Tomalin

Hardy's poems are "most often located in the past"

"in response to inhabiting a world of dizzying change" Lucas

Hardy/pessimism

"vulnerable, doomstruck man" Tomalin

Hardy and Eliot comparison

"Hardy shared many of the same concerns as Eliot, though his articulation of them differed" Gillies

Hardy's 'LOVE poems' to Emma are

"arguably the most powerful love lyrics in the English language" Fincham

Hardy's Emma poems are

"racked with guilt and wonder" Mallon

Hardy's poems of Emma's DEATH are some of the

"finest and strangest celebrations of the dead in English poetry" Tomalin

Famous poets influenced by hardy's modern and original style

Robert Frost, Auden, Phillip Larkin (Hardy experimented with new stanza forms and use of voice, full of idiosyncrasies)

hardy's love of Emma in death

"he loved the woman dead and inaccessible as he had never loved her in life" tomalin

Eliot's view on death

"we don't actually fear death, we fear that no one will notice our absence" Eliot