Critical Essay: "Thomas Hardy and the Impersonal Lyric" critique

Thomas Hardy: Impersonal or Personally Pessimistic?

Romantic poets display a variety of distinguishable characteristics. Just as the characteristics of Romantic works are varied, so are the personalities of Romantic poets. This seems reasonable when one considers the main idea behind Romantic poetry, which is the strong emphasis on feeling and emotion. Romantic poets rely largely on the idea of imagination, while also believing in the power of one’s own intuition. Many readers today feel that Romantic authors were fueled by a dislike for social order, as many of their works are built around the feeling that comes with freedom from rules. Romantic poems often showcase a love of beauty and nature. The experiences had by Romantic poets involving this love of beauty and nature are expressed in their works. Many critics believe that one’s account of an experience has more validity if it is written during the actual experience. For example, William Wordsworth is infamous for his accounts of experiences in nature, which were composed during the actual experience. Thomas Hardy’s works were not written about whatever event was occurring at the moment. Instead, Hardy’s works were the result of the understanding of an event after the event took place. Susan M. Miller’s critique of Thomas Hardy, titled, “Thomas Hardy and the impersonal lyric”, expresses her belief that Thomas Hardy’s poems are anti-Romantic. She sees Hardy’s works as expressions of his ideas rather than expressions of his emotions. While many Romantic poets obviously focused on one’s own experience, Miller feels that Hardy focused more on knowledge and understanding. She feels that when one’s understanding of an event happens after the event occurs, rather than as the event is occurring, it forces one to distance his or herself from the event. This, Miller explains, causes the event to become a psychological burden, making it difficult for one to recognize the meaning of the event at hand. Thomas Hardy would disagree with Miller’s opinion of understanding. He believed that any new understanding of an event was relative to one’s feeling about that particular event. In Hardy’s opinion, the fact that one understood an event was far more important than when the act of understanding took place. Miller’s view of Hardy’s emphasis of understanding is the reason she describes him as anti-Romantic. Hardy lived a life full of disappointments, and this led him to believe in fate. He uses the idea of fate in each of his works, which explains why most of his poems ended with a tone of disappointment. A poet writes of the world as he or she sees it, and through the eyes of Thomas Hardy, the world was a dreary place. While he may not have the traditional optimistic view of a Romantic poet, he does focus on feeling. His skeptical view of the world was not the result of a psychological burden, as Miller states. Instead, one could say that Hardy had a skeptical view of life because he felt that the world was cruel and unfair. He may not have focused on the same feelings as other Romantic poets, but that does not make Hardy anti-Romantic. His feelings were altered by the experiences he had during his own life. Without the experiences of his own life, he would not have the particular feelings about the world that he expressed in each of his works.

Miller’s first explanation of her belief that Hardy is anti-Romantic concerns Hardy’s perception of experience. She writes, “It is rather in the opportunity poetry gives us to view the shape of life from a less immediate vantage: to perceive the structure of human experience with
what Auden called a “hawk’s vision” — a perspective that exchanges immediacy for scope.” (Miller 96) Miller uses a poem by Hardy, titled “Your Last Drive”, as an example of his retrospective perception. In this poem, Hardy expresses his feeling that the true importance of a particular moment is not revealed through any point of view. This poem is coated in the heavy despair that Hardy felt about this event, and it is clear to readers that this anguish had been with him for quite a while. This poem was written about his first wife, from whom he was estranged. Her death made a huge impact on Hardy, as he regretted waiting until her death to realize how much he loved her. Hardy believed that no moment can ever reveal its true importance. One cannot possibly realize how much an event will change his or her life until he or she has had the opportunity to experience the feelings that come with the understanding of the event. In “Your Last Drive”, Hardy expresses what he believes his wife would have been thinking during her last drive if he had been in the car with her. He describes her thoughts in the last two lines of the poem, which state, “I go hence soon to my resting-place; you may miss me then.” In response to this poem, Miller writes, “The poem with its piling up of negations mocks the very idea that experience, lived moment by moment, might be other than inscrutable.” She believes that Hardy’s intended use of this poem was to ridicule the idea that any experience lived at the moment it occurs could possibly make legitimate sense. Miller’s response seems harsh when one considers the fact that Hardy was writing about someone who actually existed. This woman was someone that he truly loved, and his strong emotions towards this woman and her death sparked his imagination. He imagined the woman he loved taking one last drive. Then, Hardy thought about what could have been going through the mind of his wife during this drive. He continued to explore this thought by imagining what it would have been like if he were in the car with her during her last drive. In the end, he realized that either way, she would have been thinking the same thing. While Miller believes this is just another poem by Hardy that ends in disappointment, one could argue that the tone at the end of the poem is one of content and relief. Instead of regretting the fact that he was not with her, he realizes that his wife would have died regardless. He seems to be giving himself reason to let go of remorse and guilt. If Hardy had never had this idea, the weight of his guilt may have never been lifted. This does not fit well with Miller’s “psychological burden” theory.

Next, Miller discusses how little benefit hindsight gives to the readers of Hardy’s poems. She writes, “Rather than body out a world of “abundant recompense” that might hope to redeem past losses in a present gain of wisdom, Hardy emphasizes instead the tragic lateness of all
knowledge, so that the wisdom won through retrospection is less often a gift than a torment.” (Miller 98) By pointing out what she sees to be a flaw of Hardy’s, Miller actually admits that Hardy did not seem to focus on what his readers would learn from his poetry. Instead, he focused on thoughts that were products of his own feelings. He makes it clear that this poem was nothing more than a mere thought of his, a simple product of his own imagination. For someone described as anti-Romantic, Hardy seems to display quite a few Romantic characteristics in this poem. He does present, in this poem, the idea that one of life’s greatest tragedies is the fact that a true understanding of an event usually comes long after the event occurred. He recognizes that regret does exist in the mind of any person who has dealt with a great loss. Hardy is a man that has been broken by the ways of fate, and it is only natural that he felt the way he did. “The Last Drive” was only written by Hardy because of the regret he had concerning the death of his first wife. Charles Baudelaire said, "Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject, nor exact truth, but in a way of feeling." Hardy was not writing about his wife’s death. He was expressing his feelings about her death.

Miller discusses another poem by Hardy titled “Neutral Tones” to further explain her belief that he is anti-Romantic. She says, “Something about the plot structure is hypothetical or self-negating, so that the situation the poem describes announces itself as impossible — a drama that can be understood only as an experiment of the imagination and not as a lived experience.” (Miller 102) It seems odd she would describe an author that she believes is anti-Romantic in this particular way. A characteristic of a Romantic piece of work is the use of imagination. Another common theme in Romantic poetry is intuition, a description that could easily be twisted to mean something as negative as a phrase like “self-negating.” Hardy’s presentation of two opposite views in “Neutral Tones” is proof that he knew that there was more than one possible way to view an experience. If this poem portrays one point of view as being more valid than another, it is because he feels this way. He is, yet again, expressing a feeling. Just because Hardy’s feelings are quite different than Wordsworth’s does not mean that they are not valid feelings. Romantic works were based on feelings, and while most of these feelings were positive, it cannot be argued that negative feelings do exist. Hardy happened to present a more pessimistic way of thinking, which would lead to thoughts that were more likely to be negative than positive.
Thomas Hardy was a man who lived a tragic life. He knew the evil that existed in the world. He also knew that wonderful things existed, such as imagination, solitude, possibilities, experience, and feelings. He knew that completely irrational thoughts and ideas existed, but that these thoughts could one day make sense. This understanding could come at any point later in life, and whenever this happened, it would change how a person felt about life forever. The more one understands something, especially something tragic, the more real the event feels. While many people choose to walk through life blindly in order to protect themselves from feelings like remorse or guilt, Hardy faced his demons. Like most Romantic poets, Hardy was against the ideas of conformity and rules. As a result, he dared to break the rules. He felt sad, so he wrote sad poems. He knew the harsh reality of life, and he did not attempt to hide this in his poetry. Most importantly, Hardy allowed his poetry to take his experiences places that reality did not. Regardless of how the poem ended, at some point in it, Hardy placed the possibility of a different ending. He knew that life’s most important lessons were found in the journey, not the destination. The road is long, and in many cases, very rough. The possibilities are endless. In fact, in the end, the journey was the destination. To some, this may seem irrational. To Hardy, this may have taken 10 years to truly understand. Either way, it is far from being anti-Romantic.