Thomas Hardy, Poet by Adrian Grafe & Laurence Estanove

Author:Adrian Grafe & Laurence Estanove
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

The influence of Darwin’s theory and the incisiveness of Stephen’s essays produced an insightful echo in Hardy’s poetics and language, as he wrote in his “ghosted” biography: “the most far-reaching consequence of the establishment of the common origin of all species is ethical.”45 Hardy claimed his position of agnostic and offered a new “empiric” and individual gaze, without rejecting his transcendentalist-romantic background and sometimes sentimental imagination. In this respect, agnosticism was a valuable passport to understand and explain “almost every aspect of the universe,”46 but not its social and emotional consequences, or as Hardy puts it in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, in the transition between old and modern times, people did experience “the ache of modernism.”47 In this respect, Stephen might be seen as a bridge and, at the same time, as a social and cultural barrier for Hardy’s ideas, since the latter witnessed the consequences and developments of modernity.

However, the connections between Stephen and Hardy seem to be not only visible when their sensibilities agree, but also when they collide. Stephen’s influence on Hardy clarifies the important negotiation of Hardy’s Victorian and modern personality with the construction of a humanistic agnosticism. Thomas Hardy’s determination in writing and his mature decision to devote his mind entirely to poetry shows above all his yearning for emotions as well, and maybe his nostalgia too. Hardy’s sentiments—sometimes buried into his personal or local memory, sometimes majestically observed through his psychological and cerebral microscope—seem to review obsessively the past, in search of Stephen’s “deep sadness [of] the world” in order to oppose and resist it.

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