The Books: “The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry” – Thomas Hardy

Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry

The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Volume 1: Modern Poetry, edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair

One of my favorite quotes from Thomas Hardy in regards to writing is something I have thought of, often – in my own work – it reminds me to stay specific, to not worry so much about universal, to let that (and the reader) take care of itself:

“A certain provincialism of feeling is invaluable. It is the essence of individuality, and is largely made up of that crude enthusiasm without which no great thoughts are thought, no great deeds done.”

He was criticized often for the “provincialism” of his novels. They took place in a 10-mile radius. He delved deep into that one particular slice of society and never left it or branched out. But DEPTH is as valuable as WIDTH and nobody was deeper than Hardy. I love his novels, although I had to come BACK to them after being forced to read them in high school (here is my post on Tess).

Speaking of Auden, he was obsessed with Thomas Hardy and for over a year read nobody else. It was Thomas Hardy 24/7. Interesting, because on the surface of it they seem very dissimilar. But Auden wrote:

“[I admire his] hawk’s vision. his way of looking at life from a very great height … To see the individual life related not only to the local social life of its time, but to the whole of human history … gives one both humility and self-confidence.”

Hardy is helpful to writers, in general.

The interesting thing is that I think that most people do not understand how anti-establishment he really was. It’s difficult to discern at times, merely because he is “in the canon” and revered and all that, but sometimes I wonder: are people reading what he actually wrote? Dude was a radical! The establishment now “claims” him but, like so many other writers in so many other times, they shunned him when he was alive. Thomas Hardy had an epiphany one day that God didn’t exist (he wrote about it in a startling poem called ‘God’s Funeral’) – and that’s the kind of thing that ruffled feathers then and still ruffles feathers. Hardy believed in larger forces, but he did not name it as God. A priest wrote to Hardy once asking him how the horrors of the world could be reconciled with God’s goodness. Hardy replied, in the third person, a chilly little note:

Mr. Hardy regrets that he is unable to offer any hypothesis which would reconcile the existence of such evils as Dr. Grosart describes with the idea of omnipotent goodness. Perhaps Dr. Grosart might be helped to a provisional view of the universe by the recently published Life of Darwin, and the works of Herbert Spencer and other agnostics.

Hardy wasn’t fucking around.

Thomas Hardy wrote novels for many years. And at some point, he switched to poetry (although obviously he had been writing verse all along). He felt, eventually, that fiction was a kind of cage – and he went absolutely insane with writing poetry. His “Collected Poems” is over eight hundred pages long. Think of that!

I LOVE his poetry. It’s not happy stuff, as a matter of fact I would call it raw, unhappy and bleak. But the language! It can’t be beat.

Thomas Hardy was married for many years and it was not a good match. They barely spoke. When she died, he found some things she had written – things that were vicious towards him – her hatred and contempt of him revealed after her death. Regardless of all of this, Hardy never really recovered from her death – and his eulogies for his long-hated wife are some of the most achingly sad and romantic poems in the lexicon. If you didn’t know the backstory, you would think this was one of the greatest love stories of all time. And who knows, maybe it was. You also can’t ever tell what will inspire you to write. She didn’t inspire him to write when she was alive, but after her death, the floodgates of poetry opened. I love his poems to his wife. I ache reading them.

Ezra Pound said, after reading Thomas Hardy’s poetry:

“Now there is clarity. There is the harvest of having written twenty novels first.”

Here is a poem that kills me.

A Broken Appointment

You did not come,
And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb.
Yet less for loss of your dear presence there
Than that I thus found lacking in your make
That high compassion which can overbear
Reluctance for pure lovingkindness’ sake
Grieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum,
You did not come.

You love not me,
And love alone can lend you loyalty;
-I know and knew it. But, unto the store
Of human deeds divine in all but name,
Was it not worth a little hour or more
To add yet this: Once you, a woman, came
To soothe a time-torn man; even though it be
You love not me.