JOSEPH BRODSKY
353
very dearth of literature about Hardy the poet is both that ignorance's
proof and its present echo. Second, because, on the whole, there is little
point in reviewing the larger through the prism of the smaller, however
vociferous and numerous; our discipline is not astronomy. Mainly, how–
ever, because the presence of Hardy the novelist impairs one's eyesight
from the threshold, and no critic I know of can resist the temptation
to
hitch the prose writer to the poet, with the inevitable diminution of the
poems as a consequence - if only because the critic's own medium isn't
verse.
So to a critic, the prospect of dealing with Hardy's work should
look quite messy. To begin with, if one's life holds the key to one's
work, as received wisdom claims, then, in Hardy's case, the question is:
Which work? Is this or that mishap reflected in this novel, or in that
poem, and why not in both? And if a novel, what then is a poem for?
And vice versa? Especially since there are about nine novels and roughly a
thousand poems in his corpus. Which of these is, should you wax
Freudian, a form of sublimation? And how come one keeps sublimating
up to the ripe age of eighty-eight, for Hardy kept writing poems
to
the
very end (his last, tenth collection came out posthumously)? And should
one really draw a line between novelist and poet, or isn't it better to
lump them together, echoing Mother Nature?
I say, let's separate them. At any rate, that's what we are going to
do in this room. To make a long story short, a poet shouldn't be
viewed through any prism other than that of his poems. Besides, techni–
cally speaking, Thomas Hardy was a novelist for twenty-six years only.
And since he wrote poetry alongside his novels, one could argue that he
was a poet for sixty years in a row. To say the least, for the last thirty
years of his life; after
Jude the Obscure
-
his last and, in my view, his
greatest novel - received unfavorable notices, he quit fiction altogether
and concentrated on poetry. That alone - the thirty years of verse writ–
ing - should be enough to qualifY him for the status of a poet. After all,
thirty years in this field is an average length for one's career, not to men–
tion life.
So let's give Mother Nature short shrift. Let's deal with the poet's
poems. Or,
to
put it differently, let's bear in mind that human artifice is
as organic as any natural masterpiece, which, if we are to believe our
naturalists, is also a product of tremendous selection. You see, there are
roughly two ways of being natural in this world. One is to strip down
to one's underthings, or beyond, and get exposed, as it were, to the el–
ements. That would be, say, a Lawrentian approach, adopted in the sec–
ond half of this century by many a scribbling dimwit - in our parts, I re-
