The Lyric Poet (1898-1922)
his melancholy, fail to win his attention. The strongest of the poems of disillusion which are the outcome of his mood, is The Newcomer's Wife, with the terrible abruptness of its final stanza. . . . At all events, one must welcome a postscript in which a blast on the bugle of war seemed to have wakened the poet from his dark brooding to the sense of a new chapter in history.
Whether or not this conjecture hits the truth of the matter, no one was prepared to deny that Satires of Circumstance, and in particular the "fifteen glimpses" that give the volume its title, produced upon the reader an effect of tragic pity and horror unequaled by anything else in the works of this modern master of tragedy, unless it be some of the more gruesome scenes in The Dynasts, or in Jude the Obscure. A tangible clue to the personal significance of the volume to its author was afforded by the memorable group of Poems of 1912-13, in which the death of Mrs. Hardy and the poet's bereavement were recorded with a beauty, pathos, and peculiar emotional restraint that frequently equals, and occasionally surpasses, the finest pieces done in a similar vein by Wordsworth. The volume also contained the famous lines on the loss of the Titanic, The Convergence of the Twain, and, as first published, closed with Hardy's first lyric of the Great War, Men Who March Away.
If Satires of Circumstance was the most sharply tragic of Hardy's books of lyrics, Moments of Vision rose to far greater heights in ripeness of thought, beauty of imagery, and perfection of form. Here Hardy at last achieved, with consummate artistry, that perfect adaptation of language and structure to the intellectual, dramatic, or lyric content of the poems, toward which he had
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