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“... seething, silkily aggressive. There was ground to be cleared, and residents had to be deported. Thomas Hardy, with his knobbly rusticities and merry peasants, would not do. In the Nation, James complained that the novel had a ‘fatal lack of magic’, and was written in a ‘verbose and redundant style … Everything human in the book strikes us as ...”

“... to stanzas, it is not well made according to the pattern of Housman or Kipling or Betjeman, nor of Hardy for the most part, nor Larkin. Beer says that when she entered upon poetry in 1953 she knew English poetry up to 1900 quite well, but the 20th-century poets hardly at all; sometime since then she has learned the 20th-century poetics of open-endedness and ...”

“... moved to remember this by J.F.C. Harrison’s ‘coda’ to his fine new book: ‘As writers like Thomas Hardy have noted, there is a certain timelessness about the common people, which means that in the last resort their experience can be expressed by myth as well as by history.’ Yes, and the response of present-day common people to the Royal Family ...”

“... but watering places and holiday resorts.’ The one novelist in the period this reminds me of is Thomas Hardy, especially in The Mayor of Casterbridge. That novel is full of improvised ceremonies, either wholly concocted or adapted from some imperfectly remembered tradition, and all given a certain gloss of venerability. So effective is the bluff of ...”

“... sausage, and sound boiled potatoes of the breed of Earthquake Wonder – with Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy propped up against the milk jug … Some people, Tim reflected as he finished his food, thought Hardy a rather repressed and dismal writer, more taken with groans than lightness of the heart. Well, he was ...”

“... both rights and reason are under several kinds of open and covert attack, the life and writing of Thomas Paine will always be part of the arsenal on which we shall need to depend.’ In the event, between the dedication and the final sentence the book says nothing about Iraq or the war on terror, perhaps in silent acknowledgment of the difficulty of knowing ...”

“... reflects the state of Britain more fully than other poets of his age excepting G. M. Hopkins and Hardy. Before describing how Places of the Mind retrieves his best work from the margin of literature I will suggest why The City of Dreadful Night was mislaid there. Its settled gloom is only part of the explanation. Dante’s Inferno, though gloomier than the ...”

“... particularly good at spotting Wordsworth echoes), then a few Georgian big-names of the day, then Thomas Hardy. As imitations, the boy Auden’s efforts are dutiful and dull. One never feels that there is anything of his own, by way of rhythm or vocabulary, pressing for a point of entry. As de la Mare, he can ‘see the fairies dancing in the ring’; as ...”

“... he makes a great deal of sense. In some ways London was not so unlike an American version of Thomas Hardy. They certainly shared the same feeling for fact. The editor of Cosmopolitan, paying London $750 a story in 1910 – a serious sum in those days – stipulated that they should be ‘virile, throbbing with reality, but not likely to repel with ...”

“... such as neglecting the garden and waving at girls in a nearby laundry.’ Larkin’s veneration of Hardy rings out the more vibrantly if one hears it against the thin words of T. S. Eliot in 1935: ‘Thomas Hardy, who for a few years had all the cry, appears now, what he always was, a minor poet.’The risk taken by the ...”

“... Stephen Tennant, Stephen Tennant, absolutely without a doubt.’ It may be added that Thomas Hardy said that Tennant was the ‘only other man he had ever met who walked like Swinburne’. The remark reminds one that, in ‘A Singer Asleep’, Hardy was inspired to a subtle pastiche of Swinburne. There was ...”

“... a Late Victorian artist now much undervalued. He did what is by far the best portrait of Hardy, and his special ability seems to have lain in pleasing his subjects and their public by making them look suitably grave and important, even a shade portentous, while at the same time revealing hidden traces of weakness, perhaps of meanness. Newbolt’s is ...”

“... conjuring up the picture of the village atheist brooding on the village idiot is not an attack on Thomas Hardy, but a defence. ‘The whole case for him is that he has the sincerity and simplicity of the village atheist’ – and so forth. ‘Paradox’ – although Chesterton himself accepted the word and used it freely – is perhaps less appropriate ...”

“... quality, to that of Wonderland, with Arthur as Alice and his big-wig literary friends – Thomas Hardy and Henry James at the Athenaeum – as mad Queens. It seems now that no one could live Benson’s supremely cushioned existence. Apart from occasional guarded forays into London literary society and royal circles, his life was passed from ...”

“... a small fortune in the art of ‘lending existence to nothing’, as Edmund Burke defined poetry. Thomas Hardy gave her the blurb of a lifetime when he said that the two greatest things about the United States were the skyscrapers and Edna St Vincent Millay. Her poems are still in print, and her famous lines still recognisable: ‘Euclid alone has looked ...”