Thomas Hardy

Abstract

Swinburne and Meredith both died in 1909, withdrawing as it were from the gathering tensions in Europe. The year was also, as C. K. Stead remarks in The New Poetic,

a year carrying the beginnings, unrecognized at the time, of what we now acknowledge to be a resurgence of poetry in the twentieth century. Yeats’s collected poems of that year put an outworn style and restricted sensibility behind him, making way for the new, robust poetry that was soon to emerge. In the same year the Imagist movement was first formed, Pound’s Personae appeared, and a valuable association between Pound and Yeats was formed.