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Throughout these poems Hardy returns to the broken key in the lock & repeatedly attempts to turn it. He never succeeds but he never fumbles. Each different movement is brisk and deft. They are the record of a sensibility always divided but never paralysed by its division, of a mind strong & capacious enough to accommodate fundamental contradictions of thought & feeling without either resolving them by sleight of hand or collapsing under their weight. They do not set out to propound a doctrine or present a picture of the universe but to explore a particular personal predicament at a particular time in history — the predicament of man whose heart remained in life as well as in death at Stinsford church while his brain took very different courses. What matters about them is the poetic power & intensity with which they describe that predicament, the compression & concentration of language they bring to bear upon its inescapable discrepancies & not any message they may seem to, but do not, contain. If they strike the reader as at times almost unbearably painful he may like to be reminded of another view of Hardy by the lady who played the part of Tess in a dramatisation of this novel late in his life: ‘A great deal has been said and written … of the sad philosophy and pessimistic attitudes to life of Thomas Hardy but to us he was not the grim cynical man often pictured and if he sometimes emphasised the darker side of life, he never forgot the sunshine of laughter. I can still hear him laugh …’ (G. Bugler, Personal Recollections of T. H., Dorchester, 1964.)
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© 1977 Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Creighton, T.R.M. (1977). The Past and the Present. In: Poems of Thomas Hardy. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15833-1_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15833-1_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
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