my Xu Zhimo

Mr Hardy's new volume of poems is a very interesting, and in some ways a baffling book...

It is full of poetry; and yet it is also full of ugly and cumbrous expressions, clumsy metres, and flat, prosaic turns of speech.

a curious mixture of the contorted and the jog-trot

Even Mr Hardy's grammar is not impeccable.

And his vocabulary, though in general it is rich and apt, has occasional significant lapses...

It is important to observe such characteristics, because, in Mr Hardy's case, they are not merely superficial and occasional blemishes; they are in reality an essential ingredient in the very essence of his work. The originality of his poetry lies in the fact that it bears everywhere upon it the impress of a master of prose fiction.

...Mr Hardy... has brought the realism and sobriety of prose into the service of his poetry. The result is a product of a kind very difficult to parallel in our literature.

...but what gives Mr Hardy's poems their unique flavour is precisely their utter lack of romanticism, their common, undecorated presentments of things. The are, in fact, modern as no other poems are.

Many of the poems - and in particular the remarkable group of 'fifteen glimpses' which gives its title to the volume - consist of compressed dramatic narratives, of central episodes of passion and circumstance, depicted with extraordinary vividness. A flashlight is turned for a moment upon some scene or upon some character, and in that moment the tragedies of whole lives and the long fatalities of human relationships seem to stand revealed...

Review in New Statesman (19 December 1914).

Meredith and Mr Hardy, coming at the end of the Romantic movement and contemporaries of that extreme poet Swinburne, have been prose writers who have tried to impart some of the virtues of prose to poetry.

But there is a section of this book, the fifteen 'Satires of Circumstance' which give it its title, in which we feel that Mr Hardy would have done better in prose. It is not that they are prosaic, but that he does not manage to tell enough in verse. In each he gives us merely a situation, an ugly sitation, with all the emphasis of verse laid on the whole ugliness, as if he had a brief against life; and in each case we feel that the whole truth is not told and could not be told in this medium.

Unsigned review in the Times Literary Supplement, (19 November 1914).

The main impression left upon the mind after perusal of Mr Hardy's new volume is admiration, mingled with some perplexity, at his mastery of technique. It is surprising that gifts so high should be contentedly devoted to subjects on the whole so narrow; and as we consider the manner in which these subjects are handled, we are confronted by a further problem; for how is it possible for a writer to be at the same time so poetic and so casual?

Mr Hardy pursues his course with excellent skill, avoiding every pitfall. His poetic tact is unsurpassable. The temper he writes in is exactly that which could alone give credibility, artistic justice, and a natural appeal to the point of view he is expressing.

What is the force of such a passage as this, if not the easy nonchalance, the unconscious, conversational tone given to a statement against which every fibre of poetry in us stiffens and rebels? If it were less casual, might it not be almost offensive?

Mr Hardy, in using these queer conversational forms...

Mr Hardy is, in fact, casual or coversational in tone, but not in workmanship.

Like Meredith, Mr Hardy, whatever else he disbelieves in, believes in the strength and permanence of truth. Like Meredith, he aims at adhering in his poetry with scrupulous care to the facts which he believes to be before him.... But Mr Hardy will not, any more than whould Meredith, have poetry at the expense of truth...

Unsigned review in The Ahenaeum (8 January 1910), No. 4289.