Thomas Hardy

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• Thomas Hardy
• Galia Benziman (bio)

Aspects of language, sound, and poetic form, alongside themes related to evolution, animals, and posthumanism, continued to engage critics of Thomas Hardy’s poetry this year. Hardy’s numerous intertextual relations and poetic influence were also an ongoing object of interest. Gender, marriage, and their connection to Hardy’s biography occupied a smaller space this year, although these topics were not entirely absent from the critical conversation. Critics kept returning to well-known and often-discussed poems like “The Darkling Thrush” or “Hap,” illuminating them with fresh insight.

The chief emphases last year were placed on poetics on the one hand and the environment on the other. Focused on the latter topic, a few intriguing studies offer new insights. Hardy was not only keenly interested in animals—birds in particular—and the natural environment, but was also among the earliest voices to interrogate the presumptions of anthropocentrism and human supremacy. Several essays and books published this year include nuanced observations on this aspect of Hardy’s work. In Birdsong, Speech and Poetry: The Art of Composition in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2022), Francesca Mackenney devotes a comprehensive chapter to this theme. Titled “‘We Teach ’Em Airs That Way’: Thomas Hardy” (pp. 137–179), the chapter places Hardy’s writing in the post-Darwinian context of the dispute regarding the relationship between language and thought and the “widespread mistreatment of ‘dumb’ creatures that Hardy decried as illogical and inhumane” (p. 137). His poetry “sought to reveal an underlying kinship between all races and classes of human beings, and ‘the whole conscious world collectively’”—a claim that Mackenney probes by reading a wide range of Hardy’s bird poems, from his most famous pieces, such as “The Darkling Thrush” and “The Blinded Bird,” to lesser known lyrics such as “The Spring Call” and “The Puzzled Game-Birds,” as well as children’s poems. Throughout his writing, Hardy draws attention to how the politics of “essential difference” has been covertly used to justify not only the mistreatment of animals but also “slavery, war and the worst atrocities that [End Page 371] human beings have committed against their own kind” (p. 143). As part of his revision of Romanticism, Hardy “appropriated the bird’s song for [his] own purposes” to depict an actual creature “mortally vulnerable to the reality of hardship and cruelty in a post-Darwinian world” (p. 162). For Hardy as a post-Romantic, poetic idealization risks losing sight of the living creature (p. 163). The “preservation of the finest ideals of Romanticism” depends on “reckoning with, as opposed to escaping from, the reality of cruelty in a darkening world” (p. 167).

Hardy’s poems balance between anthropomorphism (the tendency to project human characteristics onto other species) and anthropodenial (the refusal to acknowledge that different species share emotions and faculties in common with human beings). Mackenney’s analysis of Hardy’s poetic birds demonstrates this duality in a comprehensive study with new insights into seldom-discussed children’s poems that may be added to Hardy’s corpus. Recent research has established Hardy’s almost certain involvement in his second wife Florence Emily Hardy’s illustrated Book of Baby Birds for children (1912), to which he anonymously contributed. Alongside the idealized depictions of birds in most poems, Mackenney observes “darker and more violent details which might be taken as a mark of Hardy’s involvement. Certain species are capable of violence and cruelty, which is described to the child-reader in grisly detail” (p. 176). In this and other texts, Hardy “emphasises that the ‘lower’ animals share in common with human beings the same basic emotions of fear and pain,” as well as more complex cognitive processes (p. 173).

In her close reading of “The Darkling Thrush,” Mackenney offers an optimistic and life-affirming interpretation of this much-studied poem. She points out that the word “unaware,” which ends the poem, has a more nuanced meaning in the canonical Romantic texts from which Hardy draws so extensively, where to be unaware is “to be in one sense more deeply aware, more profoundly responsive to the natural world”; the ambiguity leaves us uncertain as to...