Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Armstrong, Tim, 1956Victorian Poetry, Volume 38, Number 3, Fall 2000, pp. 422-426 (Article) Published by West Virginia University Press DOI: 10.1353/vp.2000.0024 For additional information more or less this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/vp/summary/v038/38.3armstrong.html Access Provided by San Antonio College at 06/19/11 3:59AM GMT 422 / VICTORIAN POETRY Thomas Hardy TIM ARMSTRONG Two books devote to Hardys rhyme have appeared in the destination year. Ellen Anne Lanzanos Hardy: The Temporal Poetics (New York: Peter Lang, 1999) is the more significant, addressing the meaning(a) issue of Hardys relation to meter, storey, and nineteenth-century historicism. Successive chapters partake with time in Hardys fantasies, in his poems of Dorset, in his love poems (The Time of Lyonesse); with elegiac time; and with Historical Relativism. Lanzanos most fundamental thesis is that Hardys poetry expresses the tension between determinism and imaginative forms of reconceptualization in which time and history are opened up to human intervention, via memory, interpretation, or the feat of a distanced stance.

There is attentive reading of the poetry, and excellent hooey on Hardys sense of layered propagation and slippages back and forth between them; TIM ARMSTRONG / 423 Lanzano is often good, too, on historiography and on Hardys relation to Carlyle. That said, the larger sweep of the ideas, outback(a) individual chapters and commentaries, is harder to discern; and the philosophical form of the debates on time she refers to (involving Comte, Spencer, Bergson, James, and others) never becomes as clear as it might, for this reader at leastâ€" arguably these issues might profitably have been case-hardened systematically in the introductory chapter, rather than simply elicited from Hardys work as they arose. The discussion is likewise sometimes hard to follow, since Lanzanos vocabulary tends toward the metaphorical and hermetic. The chase passage is... If you want to get a full essay, smart set it on our website: Ordercustompaper.com

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