The Life of Thomas Hardy
took hold of the traditional rigid molds and poured into them his seething feeling and vital thought. Occasionally the very vitality of his message distorted or smashed the formal pattern chosen—but the result was not then necessarily inartistic, because the tortured verse often expressed a torturing and grinding philosophy. It cannot be said that he advocated formal freedom, thereby allying himself with the younger radical poets, but he frequently smashed the old forms, perhaps unintentionally, and produced something that is as new and fresh as the latest of the "new voices," and much freer from absurdity. Above all things, his form was perfectly suited to his subject-matter.
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The reader of Hardy's lyrics was amazed no less by the variety of material and idea he encountered than by the variety of formal expression. He approached the books with a slight feeling of dread—anticipating an endless succession of fruitless "lucubrations over the social rubric" and dismal speculations on the purposelessness of the universe. He found, indeed, the expected Hardy-philosophy, expressed with an accentuation rather than a softening of the ideas that keep the Hardy-novels on the shelves of public libraries rather than in the hands of the readers. But he found also a poet—even though he was a cosmic poet and made no pretensions to be anything else—who was exceedingly responsive to the life that seethes about him for whom the flavor of events and experiences was a thing in which no less pure delight was to be found because its significance in a larger
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