The Life of Thomas Hardy
striven since his earliest attempts at versification. It was a book that but few could enjoy at a first reading, but the strange rhythmic cadences, the seemingly perverse and distorted handling of the language, and the delicate and unusual variations on the Hardy-situations and the Hardy-philosophy that one learned to look for, finally exercised a charm that completely dispelled all memory of the impression of queerness that distracted the reader at first. Except for the collection of war-poems at the end, the book, as well as the Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922), consisted entirely of miscellaneous and entirely undated pieces.
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Although the characteristics noted above serve to distinguish the volumes from each other, these books present, in general, such uniform qualities in technique, material, and content, that a chronological arrangement of the later lyrics seems rather futile. To follow out such an arrangement would, at all events, be almost an impossibility, as Hardy took care to date but very few of his poems. It is all one can do to extricate the very early poems from the mass of the later, "post-fictional" material. Hardy's aims, both artistic and intellectual, have been singularly steady and consistent through his long career, and while his later work seems to show an increasing facility and sureness of touch, his objectives remain substantially the same as they were when he ceased merely experimenting and began to write poetry in earnest. One finds the same kind of criticism leveled at
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