newcritics - Latest Comments in Thomas Hardy and the Titanic

Re: Thomas Hardy and the Titanic

download titanic movie — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 13:01:08 -0000

I hope the "smart ship" part was sarcastic in that one. Anyway, good points being raised here, I enjoyed the short read although there's something wrong with single and double quotes on your blogs. They show up as HowÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s etc. in both IE and FF

Re: Thomas Hardy and the Titanic

M.A. Peel — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 21:04:25 -0000

Dan, I love the Donald Hall tidibt--thanks. I agree Hardy is not a great poet, and I don't choose his work when I need any sort of poetic fix.
Looking at my own bookshelf I was reminded of two things: I.M.Parsons included 4 of Hardy's poems in his superb "Men Who March Away" anthology of World War 1 poets (taking the title of his colletion from Hardy); and that Paul Fussell begins "Great War and Modern Memory" with a piece by Lytton Stachey from 1914 that sounds like he is writing about the war, when he is actually reviewing Hardy's recent volume of poems, "Satires of Circumstances." From that reference Fussell unfolds his whole thesis of the development of irony through the "stages" of WWI literature, and he ends his work with Hardy. So the man's place in English letters is pretty well set.

Re: Thomas Hardy and the Titanic

Dan Schneider — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 08:43:14 -0000

The problem with Hardy is that while he was very adventurous, his musicality and word choices- esp. cliches, was not good.
I admire his daring, but far too many of his poems concern loss and grieving over it, and are quite trite, as well poorly executed. As proof, current Poet Laureate and doggerelist Donald Hall claims Hardy as the greatest English poet- which says it all.
I've three collections of Hardy's, one with about 30 poems, one with about 200, and one with over a 1000. He's better when extremely selective, just like Emily Dickinson. Both pretty much repeated themselves and wrote the same seven or eight poems over and again with little variation.
With the top 20 or so of his poems in front of you, you can argue he's a good, solid- albeit nowhere near great poet. But with 1000 poems to choose from the delimited nature of his cosmos will stupefy.
Mark Van Doren, incidentally, is one of the rare poets for whom the inverse is true, Like Hardy, I have more than one collection, and the larger collection shows he was far more daring and diverse than the shorter one does, as well a better poet than Hardy, although both were formalists.
A similar effect happens in translations- I have 4 Pasternaks, but only one of the books reveals his greatness.
If you read Rilke, say, you'll find his greatness transcends even bad translators liek Robert Bly, but the diff in quality shows if you compare Bly with Stephen Mitchell, or Edward Snow.
The only translator-proof poet I've ever found is Osip Mandelstam.