Donald Davie, writing in With The Grain, was quite taken with Hardy.
Saw him as a precursor to modern _English_ poetry - that's England in
the country, not the language - making a "direct line" between Hardy
and, wait for it, Phil "The Glum"[1] Larkin, skipping out all that
messy, and foreign, modernism stuff. Mind you, what happens to those
WW1 shirkers? He's not the first or the last to try and do so. If you
skip Pound or Eliot or even Thomas and Owen, then you can get back to
being pastoral and religious and provincial, buttered scones for tea,
the Home Service and all that. Mind you, Davie had an axe to grind -
he lost his Vice Chancellorship of some steel-and-glass uni after
failing to control a lock-out in the 60s.
Anyway, With the Grain is an interesting read nonetheless. Even if I
can't remember much about it bar the insularity.
Roger
[1] That's a Home Service joke BTW.
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