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THOMAS HARDY (286 pp.)-Edmund Blunden-Macmillan...
Hardy's reputation as a novelist has never shrunk: he has been spared the indignity of being forgotten and "revived." And in recent years there has been a steady growth of interest in his poems. In an affectionate biography written ten years ago and now republished, Edmund Blunden, himself a minor Georgian poet, rates Poet Hardy almost as high as Novelist Hardy. With Blunden's book comes another book, a work of scholarly piety by Colby Professor Carl Weber, possib'y today's foremost Hardy scholar. In Hardy and the Lady from Madison Square, Weber unearths...
...face of it, Hardy was poorly endowed for poetry. He has none of Tennyson's elegance, little of Browning's knack for the whiplash phrase. His music creaks, his language limps. One critic compared his rhythms to the rattling of a milk cart, and Author Blunden, with more justice, writes that Hardy the poet "is ever on the road . . . tackling the stony hill rises...
Hoping in the Gloom. Hardy's poems are limited in emotion; says Critic Blunden: his muse "lives too much in the frown." But the range of Hardy's subject matter is as wide as the range of his sympathies. In Reminiscences of a Dancing Man, a gay country dance turns into the dance of death; in The Respectable Burgher, an English gentleman who has been reading "higher criticism" of the Bible decides to turn to "that moderate man Voltaire"; in A Tramp-woman's Tragedy, the heroine teases her "fancy-man" into committing a pointless murder...
...James offered rich detail on a man who in the past three years has increasingly been regarded as America's greatest novelist. Franz Kafka was brought to life in Max Brod's biography and scalped in Paul Goodman's Franz Kafka: His Prayer. By comparison, Edmund Blunden's solid Shelley: A Life Story seemed a challenge to current taste...