Thomas Hardy / Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Considered purely as a poet, Thomas Hardy has earned the status of a Modernist, or at the very least an honorary Modernist. Claire Tomalin's recent biography of Hardy would have us believe that, in essence, Hardy had a full career as a late Victorian novelist, then retired, then was suddenly reborn as a craggy and philosophical Modernist poet, a latter-day Robert Browning for the age of the sinking of the Titanic and onset of the Great War. Tomalin assesses Hardy's "short, harsh poems" quite favorably -- noting that the undervaluing of Hardy's poetry began when his 1914 volume "Satires of Circumstance could not have appeared at a more unpropitious time, in the first winter of the [Great] War."[footnoteRef:0] Tomalin is not alone in thinking Hardy's poetry has been underrated, and that Hardy's reputation deserves to be higher than it is, ironic because those English...
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