Thomas Hardy’s Narrative Art: the Poems and Short Stories

Abstract

Hardy was such a productive writer that I can hardly hope to do full and proper justice to my subject. The Complete Stories,¹ in Professor Page’s edition, runs to some 839 pages of text, or about 50 tales, and I don’t need to emphasise Hardy’s plurality of poems. It’s best summed up for me by Christopher Ricks in his essay ‘A Note on Hardy’s “A Spellbound Palace”’, where he writes that, ‘A friend of mine, when I recently presented him with “A Spellbound Palace”, said, with simple truth, ‘There’s always another Hardy poem”’.² There may even be a note of irritation in this constant discovery of ‘another Hardy poem’. However, for those of us who can’t get enough of Hardy’s poetry, the bottomlessness of The Complete Poems is a delight and fascination rather than an annoyance. It’s when you find yourself having to write about them that the astonishing numerousness of his poems becomes — not irritating, but humbling, and perhaps even baffling.