Thomas Hardy Critics

Jean Brooks on Hardy and Modernism.

Because Hardy's 'place in literature has always been controversial, constant reassessment is essential to keep the balance between modern and historical perspective'.

Claire Tomalin on Hardy's elegies

She called his elegies 'the finest and strangest celebrations of the dead in English poetry'.

Thomas Mallon on Hardy's poetry.

Hardy's poems are 'racked with guilt and wonder'.

Laurence Coupe on 'Neutral Tones'.

Coupe discovers that the typical Hardy poem illuminates a moment set against a narrative framework. He argues that it is the tension between them that produces a special kind of beauty.

Hardy on war.

'The romance of contemporary wars has withered forever'.

David Constantine on 'Drummer Hodge'.

'For Hardy, the realities of life were there to be engaged with honestly and unflinchingly, not escaped from in the quest for a higher reality'. In his notebooks for 1885, Hardy wrote that it is 'The business of the poet and the novelist to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things'.

Donald Davie on 'Drummer Hodge'.

'Hardy is a poet who dells on human mortality'.

Philip Larkin quote for 'An August Midnight'.

'His subjects are men, the life of men', this poem shows an awareness of man's place within his environment.

Donald Davie on 'An August Midnight'

Hardy is 'a poet of rural nostalgia. His is a poetry of engaging modesty and decent liberalism'.

Claire Tomalin on 'The Darkling Thrush'.

The harsh consonant alliteration sounds in the second stanza evoke 'the tread of a funeral march'.

Dennis Taylor on 'The Darkling Thrush'.

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

John Lucas on 'The Ruined Maid'.

'His is a poetry of social engagement'.

Dennis Taylor on 'The Ruined Maid'.

'Hardy raises major questions about the nature and meaning of experience that preoccupies the Victorians'.

Florence Dugdale quote for 'The Haunter'.

The 'Emma' poems 'are a fiction, but a fiction in which their author has now come to believe'.

Peter Widdowson quote for 'The Haunter'.

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

John Paul Riquelme on 'The Voice'.

Hardy's elegies 'resist the tendency of elegies to provide comfort in situations of loss'.

Quote from Claire Timeline on Hardy and time for 'At Castle Boterel'.

'Time-torn man'.

James Richardson on Hardy for 'At Castle Boterel'.

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

Claire Tomalin on 'The Oxen'.

Hardy lost his faith due to Darwin's 'The Origin of Species', yet he 'cherished the memory of belief'. He was attached to country rituals such as May Day (as depicted in Far From the Madding Crowd), and this owes its existence to religion.

Julie Cohen on 'Afterwards'.

Hardy was a man 'who struggled with tragedy, remorse and the idea of God'.