Thomas Hardy
(1840–1928)

Both a novelist and a poet, Thomas Hardy is sometimes called "'the last of the great Victorians."' Like Matthew Arnold, Hardy held a pessimistic view of the world. In his great novels he depicted people striving against overwhelming odds within a society and universe that were uncaring. Unlike Arnold, however, who sought to improve society, Hardy remained a passive observer of the ills of his century; if he offered comfort at all, it was in the uncertain hope that the future would be at least different, if not better.

Thomas Hardy was born in Dorset, a region in the southwest of England noted for its agriculture and, perhaps more importantly, for its ruins which date to Anglo-Saxon and Roman times. This "'Wessex,"' as Hardy fictionalized the region in his poems and novels, is the setting for the works that established Hardy's reputation as a writer. In Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891), and his masterpiece, Jude the Obscure (1895), Hardy's characters move against a haunting landscape that is at once ancient and modern, starkly beautiful yet indifferent to the tragic lives of its inhabitants.

Despite the undeniable greatness of Hardy's novels, the bleak view they presented was distressing to a public who much preferred the life-affirming optimism of Tennyson and Browning. So intense, in fact, was the angry response to Jude the Obscure upon its publication that Hardy thought it wise to abandon the novel in favor of his first literary love, poetry. An epic verse drama about the Napoleonic Wars, The Dynasts (1904–1908), earned Hardy immense public acclaim. With each book of verse that he produced over the next two decades, his reputation as a man of letters grew. When he died, the world honored him by burying his ashes in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey, though, as a token to the region that he loved, his heart was buried in Dorset.

Hardy's poetry marks a bridge between the Victorian Age and the Modernist movement of the twentieth century. In his use of strict meters and stanza structure, Hardy was unmistakably Victorian. One contemporary critic called him "'the most fertile inventor of stanza-forms in all English literature."' Another critic, Leonard Woolf, viewed Hardy as one of the spiritual parents of the modern generation. Hardy's use of "'nonpoetic"' language and odd rhymes, coupled with his fatalistic outlook, were both source and inspiration to numerous twentieth-century writers, among them such important figures as Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sassoon, and Robert Graves.

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