SOURCE: Meyers, Jeffrey. “Hardy and the Warriors.” New Criterion 21, no. 1 (September 2002): 34-40.

In the following essay, Meyers discusses Hardy's influence on post-World War I poets.

The Great War in Europe devastated towns and villages, obliterated irreplaceable architecture, and destroyed an entire generation of young men. The survivors were conscious of living in a shattered civilization, and felt a collective lack of confidence and direction. In “Signs of the Times,” written in the late 1920s, D. H. Lawrence described how young men under thirty, sick of war and materialism, have

a certain instinctive contempt for old values and old people: a certain warlessness even moneylessness, a waiting for the proper touch, not for           any word or deed. 

The aged Thomas Hardy had “the proper touch.” His bleak but unflinchingly realistic vision profoundly appealed to traumatized war poets. Prominent survivors—including Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, and T. E. Lawrence—made...