Influences

Abstract

The ‘high singer’ is Shelley. Hardy admired him more than any other poet and when he was working in London in the 1860s (‘Her Initials’ is dated 1869) he read him closely and carefully, pencilling hundreds of marks in the margins of the volume of Shelley he owned. Though there can scarcely be two more dissimilar poets, Shelley’s influence on Hardy’s work was vast — a fact which may seem surprising as Shelley’s Romanticism has been largely discredited nowadays. No one now thinks ‘O world, O life, O time’ a great poem, though Hardy did. He revered Shelley and tracked him like a ghost. So, describing a child-hood visit to London when he and his mother stayed at an inn where Shelley used to meet Mary Godwin ‘not two-score years before’, he conjectures that their room ‘may have been the same as that occupied by our most marvellous lyrist’. And in his short story, ‘An Imaginative Woman’, he dramatises something of his fascination with ‘the poet he loved’ when he describes Emma Marchmill’s reactions to the rough drafts of Trewe’s poems which are ‘like Shelley’s scraps, and the least of them so intense, so sweet, so palpitating, that it seemed as if his very breath, warm and loving, fanned her cheeks from those walls’. Curiously, he lifted the extensive comparison of Trewe’s drafts to Shelley’s scraps from the introduction to Buxton Forman’s 1882 edition of Shelley, and the confusion between love and Shelley’s poetry in the story, with the subsequent disillusion described in ‘Her Initials’, is a movement entirely characteristic of the novels and poems.