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PARTISAN REVIEW
gret to inform you, especially. The other approach is best exemplified by
the following four-liner, written by the great Russian poet Osip Mandel–
starn:
Rome is but nature's twin, which has reflected Rome.
We see its civic might, the signs of its decorum
in the transparent air, the firmament's blue dome,
the colonnades of groves and in the meadow's forum.
Mandelstam is a Russian, as I said. Yet this quatrain comes in handy be–
cause oddly enough it has more to do with Thomas Hardy than any–
thing by D. H. Lawrence, a Brit.
Anyway, at the moment I'd like to go with you through several
poems by Mr. Hardy, which by now I hope you have memorized. We'll
go through them line by line, so that, apart from whetting your appetite
for this poet, you'll be able to see the process of selection that occurs in
the course of composition, and that echoes and - if you don't mind my
saying so - outshines the similar process described in the
Origin oj Species,
if only because the latter's net result is us, not Mr. Hardy's poems. So let
me succumb to the perfectly Darwinian, logical as well as chronological
temptation to address the poems belonging to the aforementioned
thirty-year period, i.e., to the poems written by Thomas Hardy in the
second part of his career, which also means in our century: this way, we
leave the novelist behind.
ill
Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 and died in 1928. His father was a
stonemason and could not afford to support him in a scholarly career,
apprenticing him instead to a local church architect. He studied Greek
and Latin classics on his own, however, and wrote in his off-hours until
the success of
Far from the Madding Crowd
allowed him to quit the job at
the age of thirty-four. Thus, his literary career, which started in 1871,
allows itself to be fairly neatly divided into two almost even parts: into
the Victorian and modern periods, since Queen Victoria conveniently
dies in 1901. Bearing in mind that both terms are but catchwords, we'll
nevertheless use them for reasons of economy, in order to save ourselves
some breath. We shouldn't scrutinize the obvious; as regards our poet,
the word "Victorian" catches in particular Robert Browning, Matthew
Arnold, George Meredith, both Rossettis, Charles Algernon Swinburne,
Tennyson, of course, and, conceivably, Gerard Manley Hopkins and A.
