Thomas Hardy's Poetry and International Modernism

Abstract

Thomas Hardy's poetry has often been treated as largely independent of the international context of the period in which he wrote. This article considers his verse more broadly within the Anglo-American-European modernist tradition as it responded to the waning of symbolism, noting parallels in particular with Pound's imagism, with the Russian Acmeist tradition, particularly the verse of Akhmatova, and with the early poetry of Rilke. This view both allows a deeper appreciation of Hardy's poetic achievement and reinforces the importance of the concept of modernism as an analytical tool in literary history.