SOURCE: Riquelme, John Paul. “The Modernity of Thomas Hardy's Poetry.” In The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, edited by Dale Kramer, pp. 204-23. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Riquelme deconstructs a number of Hardy's poems in an attempt to define what makes them “modern.”

Hardy Among the Modernists

As with literary Romanticisms, a variety of literary modernisms can be described, and no description of modernism as a singular, determinate movement will gain universal assent.¹ Among the varieties of poetic modernism, Thomas Hardy's is distinctive because of its class-inflected, skeptical, self-implicating tendencies. The modernity of Hardy's poetry reveals itself in highly ambiguous language, in a resistance to conventional attitudes and hierarchies involving nature and society, in the transforming of lyric traditions, and in an insistence by means of negativity on the possibility of achieving a defiant, permanently revolutionary freedom to choose and to refuse. It...