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What We Talk about When We Talk about Hardy's Poetry, or How They Brought the Bad News from Essex to Wessex

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Edward Neill
Edward Neill
Affiliation:
Middlesex University
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Extract

One of the most influential of recent efforts to take Hardy's strange poetic reputation in hand has been that of Donald Davie, himself a poet, who in Thomas Hardy and British Poetry saluted Hardy's “scientific humanism” and noted his poetic “engineering” as that of a poetically “self-made man.” Thus Davie re-made Hardy, creating a combination of a poetic Samuel Smiles and a poetic Isambard Kingdom Brunei conducting himself with technical assurance and brio — but with limited and “mechanical” poetic aims (13, 40). Perhaps it's the “visibly ideological” nature of Davie's performance here which makes it still so arresting, and “smaller and clearer as the years go by.” In a once-famous essay, “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca,” T. S. Eliot complained (or at least explained) that the many writers about him re-made Shakespeare in their own images. Coleridge's “smack of Hamlet,” which read off a Hamlet invested with his own qualities as he construed them, perhaps also indicates how common this sort of thing may be.

Type
Review Essays
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , fall 1998 , pp. 489 - 505
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

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