+ − Survey 44:48 Ap 3 ’20 270w
HARDY, THOMAS. Collected poems, lyrical, narratory and reflective. *$3.40 Macmillan 821
20–26754
“This book contains all of Thomas Hardy’s poetry except ‘The dynasts,’ including poems which have appeared in his prose works.”—Booklist
“There have been many poets among us in the last fifty years, poets of sure talent, and it may be even of genius, but no other of them has this compulsive power of Hardy. The secret is not hard to find. Not one of them is adequate to what we know and have suffered.... Therefore we deliberately set Mr Hardy among the greatest.” J. M. M.
+ Ath p1147 N 7 ’19 2200w + Booklist 17:21 O ’20
“Let it be said straight out that in our opinion, whatever else Mr Hardy’s writing, susceptible to scansion, is, it is not poetry. It is not poetry, because, in the end, poetry is in a sort illusion.... He has been guilty of the last, the unforgivable sin in poetry—* *he has sinned against love, for which there is and should be no forgiveness.”
− + Sat R 128:459 N 15 ’19 1250w Spec 122:512 O 18 ’19 20w
“Mr Hardy, once and for all, set up as poet, then, at an age when Shakespeare left our mortal stage. This book, for that reason alone, is an unprecedented achievement. Apart from that, to read steadily through it—and what severer test of lyrical poetry could be devised?—is to win to the consciousness not of any superficial consistency, but assuredly of a ‘harmony of colouring’; not, however keen the joy manifest ‘in the making,’ of an art become habitual, but of a shadowy unity and design.”