‘As near to poetry … as the conditions would allow’: the Presence of the Poet in Hardy’s Novels

Abstract

In the years after 1898, Thomas Hardy spent a good deal of his intellectual and emotional energy making the case that he had been a poet all along — even during the years when he was writing novels. Sometimes he tried to make this case by denigrating his fiction and doing all he could to turn his readers’ attention away from his novels and towards his poetry, but in his most extended commentary on the relationship between his prose and verse — the paragraphs on that topic near the beginning of Chapter 24 of The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy — he takes a different approach and argues instead for the similarities between his work in the two genres. The chapter is called ‘Collecting Old Poems and Making New’, and one of its main objects is to account for the career change from popular novelist to poet in a way that celebrates Hardy the poet without denigrating Hardy the novelist. Here is the key passage:

The change, after all, was not so great as it seemed. It was not as if he had been a writer of novels proper, and as more specifically understood, that is, stories of modern artificial life and manners showing a certain smartness of treatment.¹

In this construction, the novels are not the mere journeywork he sometimes called them but are instead serious literary efforts that are distinguished from most writing in a similar form (‘novels proper’) by the ways in which they resemble poetry.