Thomas Hardy / Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Considered purely as a poet, Thomas Hardy has earned the status of a Modernist, or at the very least an honorary Modernist. Claire Tomalin's recent biography of Hardy would have us believe that, in essence, Hardy had a full career as a late Victorian novelist, then retired, then was suddenly reborn as a craggy and philosophical Modernist poet, a latter-day Robert Browning for the age of the sinking of the Titanic and onset of the Great War. Tomalin assesses Hardy's "short, harsh poems" quite favorably -- noting that the undervaluing of Hardy's poetry began when his 1914 volume "Satires of Circumstance could not have appeared at a more unpropitious time, in the first winter of the [Great] War."[footnoteRef:0] Tomalin is not alone in thinking Hardy's poetry has been underrated, and that Hardy's reputation deserves to be higher than it is, ironic because those English poets…...

Thomas Hardy's riting Style
Thomas Hardy was a successful writer of novels, short stories and poetry. hile each of these areas could be used to analyze his writing style, the area of choice is his poetry. This is based on two reasons. Firstly, poetry is an area of writing that comes closest to representing the writer's style because of its personal nature. Secondly, it is known that Hardy had to revise many of his short stories to make them acceptable for publication. The short stories then, do not only represent Hardy's own style, they also represents what publications wanted to see. Hardy's poetry is thought to be the best example of Hardy's own individual style, and for this reason the poetry will be considered as a means of investigating his style.

This overall style has been described saying, "His style is rugged, his tone often melancholic, and his humor grim, but his…...

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Works Cited

Firor, R.A. Folkways in Thomas Hardy. New York A.S. Barnes, 1931.

Houghton, W.E., & Stange, G.R. Victorian Poetry and Poetics. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959.

Hurford, C. Favorite Verse. London: The Book Company, 1996.

Kamm, A. English Literature. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1993.

Thomas Hardy's Poem "The Voice"
The title of Thomas Hardy's poem "The Voice" reveals a lot about its mode of delivery. The audible whispers of the woman calling, calling are conveyed to the reader through literary devices such as rhyme and rhythm. The voice of the woman is translated into the voice of the poet. "The voice" of the woman becomes a symbol of the narrator's memory, which is tainted by illusion and attachment to the past. The poem does not reek of sadness, however. The mood of the poem remains lighthearted and jovial, evident in the imagery, rhythm, and rhyme scheme. Hardy cleverly paces his lines and stanzas so that the central theme and imagery of "The Voice" become integrated with the language, structure, and tone of the poem. The sentiment of missing someone, of longing for a lost lover through the contented lens of the present, is delivered through…...

The Heath is described as "Ancient, unchanging, untamable, sombre and tremendous..." (ibid) www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=6200808
Grimsditch also sees a relationship of the Heath to the characters, particularly the character of Eustacia. "It is in accord with moods of loneliness, melancholy and even tragedy, and these moods predominate in the nature of its adopted child, Eustacia... " (ibid)

In essence the Heath represents the dominant mood and symbol of the book. It is against this background that the activities and relationships of the main characters are meant to be understood.

The heath is the dominant symbol of the work; indeed, some critics have called it the dominant character. Each character's response to the heath brands him inalterably in the scheme of Hardy's world. Wild, fertile, impassive, and primal, the heath provides the backdrop and the energy against which all action must be judged.

Jekel 90)

The above assessment by Jekel is founded on the intensity with which…...

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Bibliography

Bailey, J.O. Thomas Hardy and the Cosmic Mind: A New Reading of the Dynasts. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956.

Fletcher R.H. The Victorian Period. Accessed March 15, 2005. http://fletcher.thefreelibrary.com/a-History-of-English-Literature/11-1-5

Furbank, P.N. Introduction to Tess of the d'Unbervilles. By Thomas Hardy. London: Macmillan 1974.

Giordano, Frank R. I'd Have My Life Unbe: Thomas Hardy's Self-Destructive Characters. University, AL: University of Alabama, 1984.

In each case, marriage for the woman has less freedom than for the man. After all, the woman cannot even properly (as Elinor evidences) express her deep-seated affection or attachment to a man, unless he has first approached her. A woman cannot initiate love, and this in itself debases her freedom of choice. This omnipresent element of Victorian culture is present in Wuthering Heights as well, when one sees that Cathy considers marrying Linton partly because "if Heathcliff and I married, we should be beggars...And he [Linton] will be rich, and I shall like to be the greatest woman of the neighbourhood, and I shall be proud of having such a husband." (Bronte) of course, she also expresses love for him, but the sort of love that is far inferior to her feelings for Heathcliffe.
This issue of inequality in marriage leads naturally to a very serious issue in all…...

Jude the Obscure, by Thomas Hardy and "Lost Illusions," by Honore de Balzac. Specifically, it will compare the theme of illusions in these two texts, citing textual evidence. The two protagonists, Jude and Lucien, are spurned into action because of their illusions; however, along their journeys of becoming a poet and a scholar, Lucien loses his illusions, whereas Jude does not.
THE ILLUSIONS OF LUCIEN AND JUDE

Poor Jude, he is a tragic victim of his illusions from the first page of "Jude the Obscure" until the last. Everything he has sought in his life has been nothing but an illusion. From the moment his teacher leaves Marygreen and tells him about the university in Christminster, Jude is doomed. He longs to study at the university, and this is his first illusion, that Christminster is the wonderland where his future will become complete. His aunt adds to the already growing illusion,…...

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References

Balzac, Honore de, and George Saintsbury. Lost Illusions. Boston: Colonial Press Company, 1901.

Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. Ed. Ingham, Patricia. New York: University of Oxford, 1998.

Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy demonstrate that conventionality is not morality, and self-righteousness is not religion. The dichotomy between religion and righteousness is a central theme of Charlotte Bronte's novel Jane Eyre. The protagonist encounters three basic types of Christian religious practice: the hypocritical, represented by Mr. Brocklehurst; the ascetic, represented by Helen Burns, and the egotistical, represented by St. John. Part of Jane's personal and spiritual development occurs by her ability to understand and reject each of these religious extremes. Jane Eyre concludes that per personal relationship to God has nothing to do with the self-righteous behavior of either Brocklehurst or St. John; nor does her personal relationship with God mirror that of the self-abnegating Helen Burns. Throughout Jane Eyre, Bronte makes references to the nature of Jane's personal spiritual growth. From her first encounter with Mr. Brocklehurst in Chapter 4, Jane shows and independent spirit…...

Graves, R.N. (1995). Hardy's "The Convergence of the Twain." The Explicator, 53 (2): 96-99.

In this essay, the eventual unity of the iceberg and the Titanic is described as a kind of love relationship. Ironically, the supposedly unsinkable ship and the iceberg were 'born for one another' to create a historical, real life metaphor of the folly of humanity. The word 'consummation' at the end of the poem is given great significance. There is a kind of humor to how the jarring hemispheres -- the 'shaken world' -- makes the crash seem like a common wedding night metaphor -- 'the earth moved.' The unity of ship and iceberg is like a sexual union of an overly willing groom and a cold bride. The ship is an illustration of the Victorian folly of trying to overcome the natural world -- both the coldness of the sea and also human sexuality.

What I learned

The…...

Through these symbols, Hardy addresses his disapproval of war.
Just as Hardy's poem uses religious images and images of death as symbols of disapproval, Frost's work uses nature to symbolize this feeling. In this case, Frost disapproves, not of war or some greater social problem, but of his own loneliness. Thus, he uses natural images like snow, the woods, and desert places to symbolize his disapproval of that loneliness. For instance, Frost describes how the snow "smother[s]" the animals in the woods (6-7), how the snow can represent his loneliness (9-12), and how the "empty spaces" of his "desert places" scare him (13, 16). Thus, while both Hardy and Frost exhibit disapproval in their works, they use different symbols to get across that disapproval, which is directed at different concepts.

orks Cited

Frost, Robert. "Desert Places." Internal.org 1936. 28 November 2008. http://www.internal.org/view_poem.phtml?poemID=120

Hardy, Thomas. "Channel Firing." Portable Poetry.com. 1914. 21 November 2008. http://www.portablepoetry.com/poems/thomas_hardy/channel_firing.html...

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Works Cited

Frost, Robert. "Desert Places." Internal.org 1936. 28 November 2008.  http://www.internal.org/view_poem.phtml?poemID=120 

Hardy, Thomas. "Channel Firing." Portable Poetry.com. 1914. 21 November 2008.  http://www.portablepoetry.com/poems/thomas_hardy/channel_firing.html

Victorian Female Sexuality
Victorian Sexuality: George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. arren's Profession and Thomas Hardy's "The Ruined Maid"

omen in the Victorian era must have suffered enormously under the massive double standards and the shameful image of a woman who wanted to be on her own. It is clear from examining the literature of the period how much discrimination was placed on women in the era. George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. arren's Profession and Thomas Hardy's "The Ruined Maid" show the intense sexual and gender discrimination that women in the Victorian era had to endure and the extreme consequences that were reserved for them upon breaking such strict traditions on sexuality and love relationships; however, George Bernard Shaw does allow for a greater sense of freedom for his female characters as his work was written much later at the tail end of the Victorian era, as long as they avoid the contact of men…...

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Works Cited

Hardy, Thomas. "The Ruined Maid." All Poetry. 1866. Web.  http://allpoetry.com/poem/8442925-The_Ruined_Maid-by-Thomas_Hardy 

Shaw Festival. Mrs. Warren's Profession: Connections Shaw Festival Study Guide. 2008. Web.  http://www.shawfest.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Mrs_Warrens_Study_Guide.pdf 

Shaw, George Bernard. Mrs. Warren's Profession. Gutenberg EBook. 2011. Web.  http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1097/1097-h/1097-h.htm

Jude the Obscure," by Thomas Hardy, "The Awakening," by Kate Chopin, and "The Odd Women" by George Gissing. Specifically, it will show the Victorian women's struggle for emancipation, even if it meant dying for it. Victorian women had to live under many societal constraints which kept them subservient and shackled to their relationships. When women struck out for independence and vitality, they were crushed by an unbending Victorian society whose mores did not encourage personal growth and transformation for women.
VICTORIAN WOMEN

Each of these novels portray a different facet of Victorian women, however, ultimately the females in these three works all suffer from the constraints of Victorian society, and each one struggles for emancipation and equality in her own way. Each woman lives outside the "norm" of Victorian society and works to become self-actualized long before it was a recognized or accepted concept.

In "Jude the Obscure," Arabella typifies what Victorian…...

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Bibliography

Chopin, Kate. The Awakening, and Other Stories. Ed. Knights, Pamela. Oxford: Oxford University, 2000.

Gissing, George. The Odd Women. Ed. Ingham, Patricia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. Ed. Ingham, Patricia. New York: University of Oxford, 1998.

Note the way that the poet uses descriptive adjectives. The bird looks down on the "wrinkled" sea which "crawls" beneath him.

This description tends to provide the impression of the power of this lonely but proud bird. Simile is used in the last line to describe and actual motion of the bid as it falls like a "thunderbolt." The use of the word "thunderbolt" again intensifies the feeling of power and strength of this bird.

The poem The Darkling Thrush by Hardy also deals with a bird but the bird in this case only appears in the last two stanzas of the poem. The thematic intention in this poem is firstly an expression of despair and depression; which is supported by the poetic description of the winter landscape. In the poem the protagonist feels that all hope is lost and this is emphasized by the images of the apparently dead world around…...

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Bibliography

Literary Terms. 5 January, 2006. http://www.armour.k12.sd.us/Mary's%20Classes/literary_terms_glossary.htm

What is Poetry? 5 January, 2006.  http://contemporarylit.about.com/od/poetry/a/poetry.htm

Tess of the D'Urbervilles
It is Stonehenge!' said Clare.

'The heathen temple, you mean?... you used to say at Talbothays that I was a heathen. So now I am at home.'

This description of Stonehenge from Tess of the D'Urbervilles is not merely the poetic imagination at work. Stonehenge is indeed, by any definition, a 'heathen temple'. This great Neolithic monument, situated in an isolated part of Wiltshire in southern England, was constructed between approximately 3100 C and 1490 C; it consists of two concentric rings of great undressed stones set upright in the ground, around a horseshoe formed by five huge trilithons (two upright stones with a horizontal stone supported across their top surfaces), with a further arc of smaller upright stones within it, and a flat stone, thought to have been an altar, in the center. Although much about Stonehenge and other such structures remains unclear, as modern archaeologists admit, the…...

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Bibliography

Bender, Barbara, Stonehenge: Making Space. Oxford: Berg, 1998.

Gossin, Pamela. 'All Dana to the Stars: Nineteenth-Century Representations of Women in the Cosmos.' Victorian Studies, 40, 1, 1996.

Grimsditch, Herbert B. Character and Environment in the Novels of Thomas Hardy. New York: Russell & Russell, 1962.

Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D'Urbervilles. London: Penguin, 1998.

Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders was published in 1887, a few years after the death of Charles Darwin. However, the novel was set in the middle of the 19th century, in about the same year that Darwin published On the Origin of the Species. Hardy may not have selected his setting arbitrarily. The Woodlanders has often been read within the context of Darwinian influences in society and literature. However, literary critics tend to emphasize the fusion between Romantic and Darwinian depictions of nature in The Woodlanders to show how Hardy drew from Darwin to develop his characters and themes. Irvine, for example, claims Hardy was an "evolutionary pessimist," and this is certainly apparent in The Woodlanders, which provides an overtly pessimistic view of human nature but especially of patriarchy (625). In fact, Hardy's The Woodlanders shows that while Darwinian principles of evolution sometimes favor members of the species with no moral…...

Ode on a Grecian Urn" by John Keats; "The Convergence of the Twain" by Thomas Hardy; and "Fern Hill" by Dylan Thomas. Specifically, it will identify the common theme in these three poems, which is time. Time stops in all three poems for various reasons, and adds to the impact of each poem in a special way.
COMMON THEME

In "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Keats is celebrating the past, stopped in time for a moment on an ancient Grecian urn. Time stands still on the urn, and all the people depicted on it are caught in a fleeting moment of time. Nothing around them can ever change, from the trees, to their love, to their age. "Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; / Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, / Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve; / She cannot fade, though thou hast…...

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Works Cited

Hardy, Thomas. Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy. London: Macmillan and Co., 1932.

Keats, John. Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820). Facs. edn: Scolar Press, 1970.

Thomas, Dylan. "Fern Hill." American Academy of Poets. 2002. 9 Nov. 2002.  http://www.poets.org/poems/poems.cfm?prmID=1160