Hardy Critics

Question 1

Alan Bennett

Answer 1

Hardy’s poems seldom offer consolation, even when that consolation might just amount to some hint of meaning or sense in the universe

Question 2

John Marks

Answer 2

The universe is indifferent to his wife’s death, and to his suffering

Question 3

Peter Cash

Answer 3

He writes as if this vivid instant in their past, this moment at Castle Boterel, is attached by a supernatural force to a certain point upon the slope and is eternally imprinted

Question 4

Tim Armstrong

Answer 4

A uniquely honest image of the poet struggling with his own grief and remorse.

Question 5

Evans

Answer 5

much of the pathos of the poem lies in its failure to be a conversation

Question 6

Gillies

Answer 6

Hardy shared many of the same concerns as Eliot, though his articulation of them differed.

Question 7

Geoffrey Harvey - Darkling Thrush

Answer 7

A modern lament for the death of God and of Nature, the poem employs a universalised and visionary landscape to record the end of place and time

Question 8

Hillis Miller

Answer 8

a detached and passive observer whose poetry displays a fundamental withdrawal from life

Question 9

Steinburg - Breaking of Nations

Answer 9

The images are not of joyous, bright work and irrepressible love but of slow, colourless, stumbling work and whispered love