my Xu Zhimo

Mr Hardy's Wessex Poems were perplexing in the unevenness of their literary quality. The contained much that was inconsiderable and that failed to distinguish itself from the most commonplace productions of early Victorian art.

(Wessex Poems)They suggested a temperament which had never learnt, as professed poets to some extent learn, to evoke the rhythmic mood at will, but which was stirred from time to time, perhaps at rare intervals, by some inner fluctuation of its own to this kind of utterance. It must be owned with regret that but few such moments seem to have gone to the making of Poems of the Past and the Present... That he should have considered that the large majority of the verses in this volume give worthy form to his thoughts and feelings can only show that he is almost wholly devoid of the faculty of self-criticism. The diction is persistently clumsy, full of ugly neologisms, with neither the simplicity of untutored song nor that of consummate art. The matter is colourless and abstract, although Mr Hardy's strength lies essentially in the actual and the concrete.

Unsigned review in The Athenaeum (4 January 1902), No. 3871.