W. B. Yeats and Thomas Hardy, as poets, were contemporaries. Their longcareers spanned the transition from Romanticism to Modernism and their poetryconstitute two of the most powerful dealings with that transition and those traditions.Younger poets after Yeats and Hardy have attested to their significant influences ontheir works respectively. Until 1930s it seems that the poets preferred Hardy as theirpoetic model, but after the 30s such a stand has become unpersuasive. Consideringthe course and interdependence of these two poets’ reputations and influences, we areled to acknowledge that Yeats and Hardy defined the options for poets for the wholeperiod of the 20th century and that consequently poets have tended to be dividedinto two distinguishable streams. This paper aims to distinguish those differentstreams through the poetic works of Yeats and Hardy.
There is some hint of determinism in both Yeats and Hardy, but with veryimportant difference. In Yeats’s early poetry human weakness is implied despite aheavy-handed insistence on nature’s sympathetic; identification with man. ButHardy’s poetry implies a human strength in the face of a nature indifferent to man’ssocial arrangements and adjustments. Yeats proceeds dramatically to make a system,a private mythology; Hardy shows the structure of a mind capable of coming to adisturbing conclusion. Both Yeats and Hardy find nature for the most partunsympathetic to man, but while Yeats prefers to escape to a dreamy or fairy landor The Great Mind, Hardy illustrates man’s own resistance and adjustment within thisworld of reality. So, while Yeats offers a vision of a higher reality beyond or behindnature, Hardy, as a result of his acute scrutiny of appearances of the real world, offers us personal and narrative instances of man’s responses to the neutrality ofnature. Hardy’s dealings with reality are for the most part moral, while those ofYeats’s incline to amorality, which means that Yeats allows himself to wander farfrom an acknowledgment of the limits of our individual lives and strengths. Thesedifferent attitudes to reality lead to their poetic tone: Hardy’s-control of tone,Yeats’s being high and energetic.
Considering the comparative characteristics of Yeats and Hardy we are led toconclude that they defined the options for the younger poets following after then:experimental and traditional, modernist and anti-modernist visionary, and discursiveand rhetorical and plain.