I imagine that the ethical debate would have been less about Hardy's
positive qualities, and more about Yeats' racy Golden Dawn affiliations and
issues related to that.
Hardy has always struck me as 'couthy', as we say in Scotland. The OED's
definition, 'full of friendly familiarity ... kindly, pleasant, genial',
leaves out the edge of irony with which we often use the word: friendliness
and kindliness can be curiously obtrudent, obliging the interlocutor to
engage on the speaker's terms; to call someone couthy can be a resistance to
that presumption.
A pretty artificial debate all the same, as you say, Doug.
P
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Poetryetc: poetry and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
> Behalf Of Douglas Barbour
> Sent: 19 December 2007 15:26
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Thomas Hardy
>
> Intriguing to see all the Hardy here recently. Of course, he's a great
> poet, albeit one whose work I seldom found all that enticing. I had a
> colleague who once presented a paper asking us to choose between Hardy
> or Yeats. Well, I found that odd in itself, as one tends to remember
> (or 'choose') individual poems, and both wrote great ones & poor ones,
> but he was really asking us to choose Hardy because he was the morally
> better person (based on what I was never sure of).
>
> If I had to choose between the poets, based on my biases, & delight in
> a number of poems, it had to be Yeats.
>
> Just another example of diversity on the list, eh? And just to have a
> couple of posts on another topic....
>
> Doug
> On 18-Dec-07, at 4:11 PM, Max Richards wrote:
>
> > Thomas Hardy : The Voice
> Douglas Barbour
> 11655 - 72 Avenue NW
> Edmonton Ab T6G 0B9
> (780) 436 3320
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>
> Latest book: Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
> http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
>
> the goddess fled
> in a golden shell
> the sea reflected
> her image.
> the sky shone
> under the scarf of Isis
>
> Robin Blaser
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