What We Talk about When We Talk about Hardy's Poetry, or How They Brought the Bad News from Essex to Wessex
Autor: | Edward Neill |
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Rok vydání: | 1998 |
Předmět: | |
Zdroj: | Victorian Literature and Culture. 26:489-505 |
ISSN: | 1470-1553 1060-1503 |
DOI: | 10.1017/s1060150300002540 |
Popis: | One of the most influential of recent efforts to take Hardy's strange poetic reputation in hand has been that of Donald Davie, himself a poet, who inThomas Hardy and British Poetrysaluted Hardy's “scientific humanism” and noted his poetic “engineering” as that of a poetically “self-made man.” Thus Davie re-made Hardy, creating a combination of a poetic Samuel Smiles and a poetic Isambard Kingdom Brunei conducting himself with technical assurance and brio — but with limited and “mechanical” poetic aims (13, 40). Perhaps it's the “visibly ideological” nature of Davie's performance here which makes it still so arresting, and “smaller and clearer as the years go by.” In a once-famous essay, “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca,” T. S. Eliot complained (or at least explained) that the many writers about him re-made Shakespeare in their own images. Coleridge's “smack of Hamlet,” which read off a Hamlet invested with his own qualities as he construed them, perhaps also indicates how common this sort of thing may be. |
Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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