JOSEPH BRODSKY
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which in itself was both down-to-earth and metaphysical.
Well, metaphysics is always down-to-earth, isn't it? The more down–
to- earth it is, the more metaphysical it gets, for the things of this world
and their interplay are metaphysics's last frontier: they are the language in
which matter manifests itself And the syntax of this language is very
crabby indeed. Be that as it may, what Hardy was really after in his verse
was, I think, the effect of verisimilitude, the sense of veracity, or, if you
will, of authenticity in his speech. The more awkward, he presumably
thought, the more true it sounds. Or, at least, the less artful, the more
true . Here, perhaps, we should recall that he was also a novelist -
though I hope we bring this up for the last time. And novelists think of
such things, don't they? Or let's put it a bit more dramatically: he was
the kind of man who would think of such things and that's what made
him a novelist. However, the man who became a novelist was, before
and after that, a poet.
And here we come close to something crucial for our understanding
of Hardy the poet; to our sense of what kind of man he was or, more
exactly, what kind of mind he had . For the moment, I am afraid, you
have to take my assessment for granted; but I hope that within the next
half hour it will be borne out by his lines. So here we go: Thomas
Hardy, I think, was an extraordinarily perceptive and cunning man. I say
"cunning" here without negative connotations, but perhaps I should say
"plotting." For he indeed plots his poems: not like novels, but precisely
as poems. In other words, he knows from the threshold what a poem is,
what it should be like; he has a certain idea of what his lines should add
up to . Nearly every one of his works can be fairly neatly dissected into
exposition/argument/denouement, not so much because they were actu–
ally structured that way as because structuring was instinctive to Hardy. It
comes, as it were, from within the man and reflects not so much his fa–
miliarity with the contemporary poetic scene as - as is often the case
with autodidacts - his reading of the Greek and Roman classics.
The strength of this structuring instinct in him also explains why
Hardy never progressed as a stylist, why his manner never changed. Save
for the subject matter, his early poems might sit very comfortably in his
late collections, and vice versa, and he was rather cavalier with his dates
and attributions. His strongest faculty, moreover, was not the ear but the
eye, and the poems existed for him, I believe, more as printed than as
spoken matter; had he read them aloud, he himself would have stumbled,
but I doubt he would have felt embarrassed and attempted improve–
ments. To put it differently, the real seat of poetry for him was in his
mind. No matter how public some of his poems seem, they amount to
mental pictures of public address rather than ask for actual delivery. Even
