JOSEPH BRODSKY
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content of his poems: they are simply extraordinarily interesting to read. And to
reread, since their texture is very often pleasure-resistant. That was his whole
gamble, and he won.
Out of the past there is only one route, and it takes you into the present.
However, Hardy's poetry is not a very comfortable presence here. He is seldom
taught, still less read. First, with respect to content at least, he simply overshad–
ows the bulk of poetry's subsequent achievement: a comparison renders too
many a modern giant a simpleton. As for the general readership, his thirst for the
inanimate comes off as unappealing and disconcerting. Rather than the general
public's mental health, this bespeaks its mental diet.
As he escapes the past, and sits awkwardly in the present, one trains one's eye
on the future as perhaps his more appropriate niche. It is possible, although the
technological and demographic watershed we are witnessing would seem to
obliterate any foresight or fantasy based on our own relatively coherent experi–
ence. Still, it is possible, and not only because the triumphant Immanent Will
might decide to acknowledge, at the peak of its glory, its early champion.
It is possible because Thomas Hardy's poetry makes considerable inroads
into what is the target of all cognition: inanimate matter. Our species embarked
on this quest long ago, rightly suspecting that we share our own cellular mix-up
with the stuff, and that should the truth about the world exist, it's bound to be
nonhuman. Hardy is not an exception. What is exceptional about him, however,
is the relentlessness of his pursuit, in the course of which his poems began to ac–
quire certain impersonal traits of his very subject, especially tonally. That could
be regarded, of course, as camouflage, like wearing fatigues in the trenches.
Like a new line of fashion that set a trend in English poetry in this century:
the dispassionate posture became practically the norm, indifference a trope. Still,
these were just side effects; I daresay he went after the inanimate - not for its
jugular, since it has none, but for its diction .
Come to think of it, the expression "matter-of-fact" could well apply to
his idiom, except that the emphasis would be on matter. His poems very often
sound as if matter has acquired the power of speech as yet another aspect of its
human disguise. Perhaps this was indeed the case with Thomas Hardy. But then
it's only natural, because as somebody - most likely it was I - once said, lan–
guage is the inanimate's first line of information about itself, released
to
the
animate. Or,
to
put it more accurately, language is a diluted aspect of matter.
It is perhaps because his poems almost invariably (once they exceed sixteen
lines) either display the inanimate's touch or else keep an eye on it that the future
may carve for him a somewhat larger niche than he occupies in the present. To
paraphrase "Afterwards" somewhat, he used to notice unhuman things; hence his
"eye for natural detail," and numerous tombstone musings. Whether the future
will be able to comprehend the laws governing matter better than it has done
thus far remains to be seen. But it doesn't seem to have much choice in ac-
