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PARTISAN REVIEW
the most lyrical of his pieces are essentially mental gestures toward what
we know as lyricism in poetry, and they stick to paper more readily than
they move your lips. It's hard to imagine Mr. Hardy mouthing his lines
into a microphone; but then, I believe, microphones hadn't yet been in–
vented.
So why push him on you, you may persist. Because precisely this
voicelessness, this audial neutrality, if you will, and this predominance of
the rational over emotional immediacy turn Hardy into a prophetic fig–
ure in English poetry: that's what its future liked. In an odd way, his po–
ems have the feeling of being detached from themselves, of not so much
being poems as maintaining the appearance of being poems. Herein lies a
new aesthetics, an aesthetics insisting on art's conventions not for the
sake of emphasis or self-assertion but the other way around: as a sort of
camouflage, for better merging with the background against which art
exists. Such aesthetics expand art's domain and allow it to land a better
punch when and where it's least expected. This is where modernism
goofed, but let's let bygones be bygones.
You shouldn't conclude, though, because of what I've told you,
that Hardy is heady stuff. As a matter of fact, his verse is entirely devoid
of any hermetic arcana. What's unique about him is, of course, his ex–
traordinary appetite for the infinite, and it appears that, rather than
hampering it, the constraints of convention only whet it more. But
that's what constraints do to a normal, i.e., not self-centered, intelli–
gence; and the infinite is poetry's standard turf. Other than that, Hardy
the poet is a reasonably easy proposition; you don't need any special
philosophical warm-up to appreciate him. You may even call him a real–
ist, because his verse captures an enormous amount of the physical and
psychological reality of the time he lived in, of what is loosely called
Victorian England.
And yet you wouldn't call him Victorian. Far more than his actual
chronology, the aforesaid appetite for the infinite makes him escape this
and, for that matter, any definition save that of a poet. Of a man who's
got to tell you something about your life no matter where and when he
lived his. Except that with Hardy, when you say "poet" you see not a
dashing raconteur or a tubercular youth feverishly scribbling in the haze
and heat of inspiration but a clear-eyed, increasingly crusty man, bald and
of medium height, with a mustache and an aquiline profile, carefully
plotting his remorseless, if awkward lines upstairs in his studio, occasion–
ally laughing at the achieved results.
I push him on you in no small part because of that laughter. To me,
he casts a very modern figure, and not only because his lines contain a
