This unity
which comes of the instinctive refusal in the great poet to deny
experience, and subdues the self into the whole as part of that which is
not denied, is to be found in every corner of Mr Hardy's mature poetry.
It gives, as it alone can really give, to personal emotion what is
called the impersonality of great poetry. We feel it as a sense of
background, a conviction that a given poem is not the record, but the
culmination of an experience, and that the experience of which it is the
culmination is far larger and more profound than the one which it seems
to record.
At the basis of great poetry lies an all-embracing realism, an adequacy
to all experience, a refusal of the merely personal in exultation or
dismay. Take the contrast between Rupert Brooke's deservedly famous
lines: 'There is some corner of a foreign field ...' and Mr Hardy's
'Drummer Hodge':--
'Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge for ever be;
His homely Northern heart and brain
Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellations reign
His stars eternally.
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