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★★★★★ 5
A Great Novelist's Wonderfully Liberating Indulgences with Poetry
Format: Paperback
While a prolific novelist, Thomas Hardy is a first-rate poet whose verse seems to get lost between attempts at poet canonization among those between late-Victorianism and early Modernism. Perhaps this narrow way of looking at the history of poetry is why Hardy's legacy as a poet is often overlooked. He doesn't neatly fit in with categories like realism, symbolism, naturalism, aestheticism, modernism, etc., because he grapples with both major and minor themes addressed and techniques used by the big names of the numerous movements that were ending, beginning, or in their prime state at the turn of the century. It's very interesting how his poems shine a light on his expertly crafted novels (especially the more provincial narratives), but I get the impression that Hardy viewed his identity as prose and verse stylist as separate personal facets. Such a self-evaluation is almost unfair to him. While undoubtedly what we might call a formalist novelist in the vein of Flaubert--one with intense philosophical interests like Austen (and Dostoevsky for a non-English example)--the formalism and philosophical bend certainly appears in his poetry, and Hardy almost seems like a freer artist when you read his verse works. This great collection proves to be curiously wonderful and will appeal to poetry lovers, Hardy enthusiasts, students and scholars of the many different art movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and those of readers with a deeply philosophical approach to reading. That said, he's wonderfully and surprisingly accessible to laypeople as well, though always provides a great challenge to his readers without pretension or esoteric persuasions (if that's a factor that you might find frustrating in poetry).
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Reviewed in the United States on August 28, 2016
