Thomas Hardy and British Poetry, 2 Aug 2001

_Thomas Hardy and British Poetry_ is an excellent book of criticism. I'm not sure that it succeds in proving its thesis -- indeed the presence of a thesis seems rather intrusive here, a bit like a primitive plot-impelling device in a play. The thesis is that "in British poetry of the last fifty years ... the most far-reaching influence, for good and ill, has not been Yeats, still less Eliot or Pound or Lawrence, but Hardy." Well, maybe: but most of that poetry was dreadful, and is perhaps almost unread now. The writer who really was influenced by Hardy was Larkin: and there's of course a chapter on him here.

I wasn't very much taken with the chapters on Hardy's poetry. The best parts of the book for me were the ones which dealt with modern writing itself: and here the interest was usually not in any connection to Hardy, but in various political and social observations. There's an excellent chapter on Kingsey Amis that contains an interesting discussion of Antigone. (Davie notes that people usually symapthise with Antigone, who prefers to keep her principles even at the cost of powerlessnes; whereas he finds himself sympathising with Ismene.)

The book's has a wide range of reference, from Tolkein to J.H. Prynne, Roy Fisher and Charles Tomlinson. It ends with an 'Afterward for the American Reader' which is a spirited blast against those British poets who "sell the native product short", and which reflects on the difference between American and British verse. To some extent this is chapter is a refutation of Alverez's condemnation (in his anthology _The New Poetry_ ) of "the gentility principle" he saw as pervasive in British poetry. Davie thinks that "gentility" ("which other Englishmen in the past have glossed as 'a sense of proportion' or even 'a sense of humour' ") is present in Tomlinson's poetic. Personally I find Tomlinson's poetry too restricted, its commitment to quiteness too stifling and unambitious: but Davie's defence is thought-provoking, and his polemic for "civic sense" and "political responsibility" (another two suggested glosses for "gentility") is convincing, particularly when seen against the background of Modernism and all its grandiose and negligently inhumane ambitions.

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