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Thomas Hardy As A War Poet

Thomas Hardy as a War Poet
Thomas Hardy is one of the most famous and prolific British writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.   Most people recognize Hardy as an author of novels, but he preferred to write poetry.   Both his novels and his poetry give a pessimistic view of the world.   Subjects for his poetry include nature, love, and war.   Most of his poems on war have tragic themes and present humans as having little control over their destinies.   A major theme of Thomas Hardy’s tragic poems is the hopelessness, loneliness, and brutality of war.
Thomas Hardy described himself as a poet, although his fame and financial success resulted primarily from writing novels.   Dennis Taylor says Hardy’s career as a poet spanned over sixty years, resulting in over one thousand poems (201).   Harold Orel
points out that Hardy spent more years of his life writing poetry than he did writing prose   fiction (2).   He preferred to be judged as a poet, not a novelist (Orel 2).   In her book on Hardy, Molly Lefebure uses his quote, “I wanted to write poetry in the beginning; now I can … my stories are written” to show his preference for poetry (131).   His novels served financial purposes while his poetry was for pleasure.   Lefebure says, “The novels had served their purpose:   had brought him his freedom; the novels were the ransom fee of the poet” (131).   Thomas Hardy showed his feelings for his poetry in his statement to a critic
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to “treat my verse … as my essential writings and my prose as my accidental” (Taylor 202).   Hardy used similar themes in his novels and his poetry.   His poetry, like his novels, deals with tragic and pessimistic themes like war.
Hardy’s war poems describe experiences and feelings of the Napoleonic War, the Boer War, and World War I.   His interest in the Napoleonic War is seen in his epic drama The Dynasts, which covers the period from Napoleon’s threatened invasion of Great Britain to his downfall at Waterloo (Taylor...