The Lyric Poet (1898-1922)
who, in commenting on the seeming strangeness of the judgments of authors about their own work, remarks: "Thomas Hardy firmly believes that his poems are much greater than The Return of the Native and Tess of the D'Urbervilles. But I do not care what he thinks so long as we have his masterpieces of fiction." One cannot dispute what is perhaps a question of personal taste, but on the other hand statements like the following, continually encountered among those to whom Hardy's poems are still a novelty, are calculated to raise the ire of those whose judgments agree with Hardy's own:
Mr. Hardy is a novelist who remains a novelist, more or less, in his verse; there is always drama lurking in it somewhere. He very rarely, one concludes, writes verse from any strong lyrical impulse, though now and then there are beautiful and surprising lyrical touches. . . . Meredith—to whom Mr. Hardy pays a noble tribute in this volume (Time's Laughingstocks)—was essentially and almost primarily a poet; to Mr. Hardy the verse form is rather experimental than inevitable.
It is hardly necessary to point out or comment on the perfectly absurd mixing up of literary genera in the first sentence of the foregoing criticism; and Meredith and Hardy, so different in spirit, the one representing the comic tradition running back through the third Earl of Shaftesbury, the other reaching back through the pure tragic tradition of Othello and Prometheus Bound, can hardly be compared as to the quality of their poetry.
Over against this sort of high-handed depreciation of Hardy's poetry, which may sometimes be partly due to over-enthusiastic appreciation of his fiction, one finds
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