One meets fairly often with the critical opinion that Mr Hardy\'s poetry is incidental. It is admitted on all sides that his poetry has curious merits of its own, but it is held to be completely subordinate to his novels, and those who maintain that it must be considered as having equal standing with his prose, are not seldom treated as guilty of paradox and preciousness.

We are inclined to wonder, as we review the situation, whether those of the contrary persuasion are not allowing themselves to be impressed primarily by mere bulk, and arguing that a man\'s chief work must necessarily be what he has done most of; and we feel that some such supposition is necessary to explain what appears to us as a visible reluctance to allow Mr Hardy\'s poetry a clean impact upon the critical consciousness. It is true that we have ranged against us critics of distinction, such as Mr Lascelles Abercrombie and Mr Robert Lynd, and that it may savour of impertinence to suggest that the case could have been unconsciously pre-judged in their minds when they addressed themselves to Mr Hardy\'s poetry. Nevertheless, we find some significance in the fact that both these critics are of such an age that when they came to years of discretion the Wessex Novels were in existence as a corpus. There, before their eyes, was a monument of literary work having a unity unlike that of any contemporary author. The poems became public only after they had laid the foundations of their judgment. For them Mr Hardy\'s work was done. Whatever he might subsequently produce was an interesting, but to their criticism an otiose appendix to his prose achievement.

It happens therefore that to a somewhat younger critic the perspective may be different. By the accident of years it would appear to him that Mr Hardy\'s poetry was no less a corpus than his prose. They would be extended equally and at the same moment before his eyes; he would embark upon voyages of discovery into both at roughly the same time; and he might find, in total innocence of preciousness and paradox, that the poetry would yield up to him a quality of perfume not less essential than any that he could extract from the prose.

This is, as we see it, the case with ourselves. We discover all that our elders discover in Mr Hardy\'s novels; we see more than they in his poetry. To our mind it exists superbly in its own right; it is not lifted into significance upon the glorious substructure of the novels. They also are complete in themselves. We recognise the relation between the achievements, and discern that they are the work of a single mind; but they are separate works, having separate and unique excellences. The one is only approximately explicable in terms of the other. We incline, therefore, to attach a signal importance to what has always seemed to us the most important sentence in Who\'s Who?—namely, that in which Mr Hardy confesses that in 1868 he was compelled—that is his own word—to give up writing poetry for prose.

For Mr Hardy\'s poetic gift is not a late and freakish flowering. In the volume into which has been gathered all his poetical work with the exception of \'The Dynasts,\'[12] are pieces bearing the date 1866 which display an astonishing mastery, not merely of technique but of the essential content of great poetry. Nor are such pieces exceptional. Granted that Mr Hardy has retained only the finest of his early poetry, still there are a dozen poems of 1866-7 which belong either entirely or in part to the category of major poetry. Take, for instance, \'Neutral Tones\':—

  \'We stood by a pond that winter day,
  And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
  And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;
    —They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.

  \'Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
  Over tedious riddles long ago;
  And some winds played between us to and fro
    On which lost the more by our love.

  \'The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
  Alive enough to have strength to die;
  And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
    Like an ominous bird a-wing….

  \'Since then keen lessons that love deceives
  And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
  Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree
    And a pond edged with grayish leaves.\'

   [Footnote 12: Collected. Poems of Thomas Hardy. Vol. I.
   (Macmillan.)]

That was written in 1867. The date of Desperate Remedies, Mr Hardy\'s first novel, was 1871. Desperate Remedies may have been written some years before. It makes no difference to the astonishing contrast between the immaturity of the novel and the maturity of the poem. It is surely impossible in the face of such a juxtaposition then to deny that Mr Hardy\'s poetry exists in its own individual right, and not as a curious simulacrum of his prose.

These early poems have other points of deep interest, of which one of the chief is in a sense technical. One can trace a quite definite influence of Shakespeare\'s sonnets in his language and imagery. The four sonnets, \'She to Him\' (1866), are full of echoes, as:—

  \'Numb as a vane that cankers on its point
  True to the wind that kissed ere canker came.\'

or this from another sonnet of the same year:—

  \'As common chests encasing wares of price
  Are borne with tenderness through halls of state.\'

Yet no one reading the sonnets of these years can fail to mark the impress of an individual personality. The effect is, at times, curious and impressive in the extreme. We almost feel that Mr Hardy is bringing some physical compulsion to bear on Shakespeare and forcing him to say something that he does not want to say. Of course, it is merely a curious tweak of the fancy; but there comes to us in such lines as the following an insistent vision of two youths of an age the one masterful, the other indulgent, and carrying out his companion\'s firm suggestion:—