Thomas Hardy as War Poet(Kansai English Studies)

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  • 戦争詩人トマス・ハーディ(特別寄稿論文,関西英文学研究)
  • 戦争詩人 トマス・ハーディ
  • センソウ シジン トマス ・ ハーディ

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Abstract

Peter Widdowson takes us by surprise when he enumerates as the major themes of Thomas Hardy war as well as sex and class. But the surprise is only for a moment. A moment's reflection on Hardy's literary career soon makes us agree with him. The battle of Waterloo was fought only 25 years before his birth. His interest in Napoleonic wars was a lifelong one as is shown by the novel The Trumpet-Major, a short story 'A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four' and, above all, that striking feat of poetic creation, The Dynasts which he completed in his sixties. While Napoleonic wars took place before he was born, the Crimean war, the Franco-Prussian war and the Boar war all broke out in his life time. Especially the Boar war which his friends and relatives took part in induced Hardy to write about ten poems including 'Drummer Hodge.' This essay is an attempt to focus on the comparatively neglected aspect of Hardy, i.e. Hardy as war poet, with special reference to the Great War and to the way the War brought a serious blow to Hardy's faiths in human progress. When England declared war to Germany which invaded Belgium to secure the route to France, Hardy was 74 years old. The reason why the War gave him so great a shock as he had never experienced is that it seriously undermined the last resort which barely kept in check the aggravation of his pessimistic view about the future of humanity. In 'Apology', a short essay attached to one of his collections of poems, Late Lyrics and Earlier, Hardy attempts to repudiate the criticism leveled to his pessimistic attitude by citing the evolutionary meliorism prompted by the advance of science. But the War made him face the fact that what the advance of science brought in was machine guns, cannons and poison gas which exacted an appallingly heavy toll of young lives caught up in this bloody war. His despair was so deep that in 'We Are Getting to the End', a penultimate poem of his final collection Winter Words, he gloomily predicted the misery of the Great War should be repeated. It might be argued that he was rather lucky not to see his prediction actualize in the form of the Second World War which arose only 11 years after his death.

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