Thomas Hardy, Poet

Adrian Grafe is a professor of English at Artois University in France. He was an associate professor at the Sorbonne for 10 years, has published broadly on poetry, and was named a Fellow of the English Association in 2011. Laurence Estanove teaches English at Paris-Descartes University, France. The author of many essays on Hardy’s novels and poems, she is a cofounder of FATHOM (French Association for Thomas Hardy Studies) and coeditor of its online journal.

“Concentrates on [Hardy’s] positive contributions to Victorian poetics...interesting essays...recommended”—Choice; “This is an excellent collection of essays: far-reaching, consistently thoughtful, frequently insightful and indeed riveting. They range from the treatment of landscape to the placement of a comma, but the volume as a whole is a sustained effort at critique and celebration.”—Phillip Mallett, University of St Andrews

• Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction (Adrian Grafe and Laurence Estanove)I—Landscape into Memory“Thinking Like a Mountain”? Hardy’s Poetic Vision of “Environment” (Adrian Tait)Reclaiming English Bones: Corporeal Commemoration in Hardy’s War Poems (Melanie East)“Wild Wavering”: Between Pastoral and Elegy (Farhi Öz)II—MisalignmentsRhyming Events and the Pessimistic Muse (Stephen Tardif)The End Game: Thomas Hardy’s Looking Glass (Richard D. Beards)From Pessimism to Idealism: The Pressure of Paradox (Laurence Estanove)III—Specters of Doubt and FaithAgnosticism and Freethinking: The Influence of Leslie Stephen (Ilaria Mallozzi)The Shadow of God in Poems of the Past and the Present (Stéphanie Bernard)Uncomfortably Numb: “In Tenebris” (Adrian Grafe)IV—Poetic Craft and AccidentalsMessy Feelings, Tidy Forms: “Poems of 1912–13” (Emily Taylor Merriman)Challenging Time: Philological and Lexicographical Landscape (Emilie Loriaux)Hardy’s Crafting of Barnes (Heather Hawkins)Punctuating Voice and Space (Charles Lock)Epilogue: The Transcendence of Things Seen (Michael Edwards)About the ContributorsIndex