Wessex Poems, 1898

Abstract

Hardy’s first book of verse, Wessex Poems, was published in December 1898. In September 1798, almost exactly a century earlier, two little-known poets named Wordsworth and Coleridge had published a book of verse called Lyrical Ballads. Looking back now, a century after Hardy’s Wessex Poems and two centuries after Lyrical Ballads, one is intrigued by the fact that the two books had at least one thing in common: they sounded a new note, a change of direction, in English poetry. Lyrical Ballads was an attempt to break away from the rigid rationalism of so much eighteenth-century poetry, a rigidity symbolised by the constant use of the heroic couplet and an artificial poetic diction which could result in lines like this:

• Say, shall we muse along yon arching shades,

• Whose awful gloom no brightening ray pervades;

• Or down these vales where vernal flowers display

• Their golden blossoms to the smiles of day …¹

Wordsworth felt that poetry should come from the heart rather than the intellect. He had been in his youth a staunch supporter of the French Revolution and wanted to democratise poetry by simplifying it, and he agreed with Coleridge that his contribution to Lyrical Ballads should be poems about ordinary life.