III.

Later Works: Poetry and Drama

Hardy's early collections of poetry, Wessex Poems (1898) and Poems of the Past and Present (1901), brought together old and new poems, while in The Dynasts, written between 1903 and 1908 (pub. 1904-1908), he created what some consider his most successful poetic work. An unstageable epic drama in 19 acts and 130 scenes, it deals with the role of England during the Napoleonic Wars, a period of history that had always fascinated Hardy (the wars had ended only 25 years before his birth, and he remembered his grandmother telling him stories about the threat of invasion by Napoleon). Hardy's perspective in The Dynasts is the same as in his novels, with the characters' actions determined by fate and cruel necessity. Hardy's later short poems, both lyric and visionary, were published as Time's Laughingstocks (1909), Satires of Circumstances (1914), Moments of Vision (1917), Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922), Human Shows, Far Fantasies (1925), and Winter Words (1928).

Although the first edition of Hardy's Collected Poems, published in 1930, contains nearly 1,000 poems the critic F. R. Leavis famously claimed that Hardy's rank as a major poet “rests upon a dozen poems”, among them “Neutral Tones”, “The Self-Unseeing”, and “The Convergence of the Twain”. Yet it is the quantity as well as the quality of Hardy's poetry that has served as an inspiration to later generations of poets: “I love the great Collected Hardy,” wrote the poet Philip Larkin, “which runs for something like 800 pages. One can read him for years and years and still be surprised”; “No English poet, not even Donne or Browning, employed so many and so complicated stanza forms,” enthused W. H. Auden.

Hardy's poetry certainly is remarkable for its massive range of complicated forms and rhythms, but also for its great simplicity of language, from the jaunty rhyming and repetition of “When I Set Out for Lyonnesse” (“When I set out for Lyonnesse, / A hundred miles away, / The rime was on the spray, / And starlight lit my lonesomeness / When I set out for Lyonesse / A hundred miles away”), to the poignant evocation of loss conveyed by the breakdown of the metre in the last verse of “The Voice” (“Thus I; faltering forward, / Leaves around me falling, / Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward, / And the woman calling”). Not all of the poems are great, but even the worst of them are good and strangely moving; as the critic William Empson explains it, “Probably it is the complacence of the man, which saw no need to try to reconcile the contradictions; the same complacence which could be satisfied with a clumsy piece of padding to make a lyric out of a twaddling reflection. No doubt he needed this quality to win through as he did. Most people who are admired for 'unpretentious integrity' have it.”

Many of Hardy's later poems are acts of farewell, to friends, family, and indeed to himself, as in the magnificent and querulous “Afterwards”:

Hardy was honoured with the Order of Merit, honorary degrees from Oxford and Cambridge universities, and the Gold Medal of the Royal Society of Literature.