SOURCE: Jacobson, Dan. “Thomas Hardy: The Poet as Philosopher.” American Scholar 65 (winter 1996): 114-18.

In the following essay, Jacobson states that reviewers have often ignored the sophisticated philosophy which led Hardy to test the limits of the use of language in his poetry.

Hardy as philosopher? The philosophizing of Thomas Hardy? Say the words out loud or write them down—and a series of other words and phrases follows inexorably. Pessimism. Gloom. Melancholy. Fate. Meaninglessness. The impossibility of faith. The mysterious workings of chance. The malignity of coincidence. Tragedy. Morbidity. Decadence. (That last term is T. S. Eliot's contribution, in After Strange Gods, to the critical lexicon.) Sooner or later Edmund Gosse's famous put-down is also bound to come to mind: “What has Providence done to Mr. Hardy that he should rise up in the arable land of Wessex and shake his fist at his Creator?”

Even readers devoted...