Thomas Hardy

Abstract

For the English line we are identifying, the first quarter of the twentieth century was a major resurgence. There were of course chance factors, but it is still the clearest group of nature-based, plain-speech, inward poetry since the time of Wordsworth himself. No other group has appeared since until the 1950s and early 60s, when in Larkin, R. S. Thomas, Hughes and the early Heaney it looked as though a sort of rural version of the ‘Movement’ of the 50s might be forthcoming. That idea is still not wholly discountable for that period, although the three named poets still living have all long moved to other things. The dangers of canon imposition hover always, yet one discerns here by criteria of the mode of writing itself, a clear group, no group, and then a shadowy group, in three broad successive periods. For the earlier twentieth-century period one can first delineate some main considerations.