From Poetry, Vol. 12 [1918]
If one were to pick out at random a hundred readers of English poetry, and ask them the question: Who is the greatest English poet to-day? about ninety-eight would instantly reply, Kipling. The remainder might be indecisive, or might cast their votes for Masefield, or for Yeats, forgetting that the latter is an Irishman. Nobody, probably, would remark, Thomas Hardy. And yet there is no doubt that Mr. Hardy is the greatest English poet now living. No one among his contemporaries has been able to turn aside from verse-writing for twenty years, and to return to it with the selfsame powerful grip and mastery. No one has been able to construct a poem of the dynamic energy and epic calibre of The Dynasts, but he. No one, finally, but he, is able, at the patriarchal age of seventy-seven, to produce poems marked with the same poignant sincerity of accent that he displayed at thirty.
If we leave Mr. Hardy out of the account, as a poet, the whole picture not only of English literature but of English thought and feeling in the past twenty years is likely to become distorted. For it has been, as he himself might say, now twenty years since he turned back to his early love, the muse, from the production of novels. And during that long and dreary time, when English imaginative literature seemed crushed and lost, he has been the one figure with, strength and dignity, and a new message to speak, a message nevertheless intimately linked with Englands past. After the giants of mid-Victorianism - Tennyson, Browning, and Swinburne - had written the works by which they are now remembered and had either passed to their reward or lapsed into the condition of echoes, after this period the stage was set for smaller men. Two spirits only remained with vitality and power enough to pronounce a new message. These were Meredith and Hardy. And Meredith, it is increasingly evident, was to Hardy what a sentimental invalid of a woman is to a firm well-knitted man. Meredith softened as he went on, softened and decayed. Thomas Hardy has shown no need either to soften or to harden. He was granite from the beginning.
What then is the reason for Mr. Hardys unpopularity as a poet? It has been suggested that it is because he uses a language deliberately unpoetical, deliberately gray in tone. But we are all of us weary of the old poetic diction, which is utterly inapplicable to modern conditions and ideas. And that Hardy eschews rhetoric is perhaps the greatest thing to his credit. The secret of the obscure dislike of his work is found in the fact that Hardy is by temperament and mind a fatalist, a determinist, a pessimist. This sort of writer always makes us uncomfortable when he appears amongst us. We do not mind reading Job or Ecclesiastes because, after all, they lived a long time ago. But when a man of our own day arises and informs us that in his deliberate opinion our present-day world, with all its thought and activities, is just so much dust and ashes, we wish to stone the fellow....