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.

Mr Hardy is too selfconscious, too deliberately rhetorical, too monotonously disenchanted, for the word poet to spring naturally to our lips at all in connection with this book. There is more of sheer poetry in his novels. Mr Hardy has his lyrical moments...although we fell that he has had difficulty in urging his vocabulary to keep pace with him...

Unsigned review in The Academy (23 November 1901)

Much that Mr Hardy has amused himself by collecting is quite trifling, conceived in the crude ferments of youth, and expressed with woodenness of rhythm and a needlessly inflated diction.

We do not conceal our opinion that Mr Hardy's success in poetry is of a very narrow range. He is entirely dependent for his inspiration upon this curiously intense and somewhat dismal vision of life, which is upon him almost as an obsession. Where he is not carried along by this, his movement is faltering, and his touch prosaic.

Review in The Athenaeum (14 January 1899)