Seeing through a glass darkly: Thomas Hardy's poetic Gothicism

The common critical understanding of Thomas Hardy as a modern existentialis t, anti-Romantic cynic, and even philosophical nihilist is only partly accu rate; it is incomplete because it typically does not consider Hardy in anot her important aspect of his work and thought: as a Romantic exponent of Got hic sensibility and aestheticism. While much is made of his richly evocativ e use of setting and nature to prove Hardy's intellectual and emotional pes simism, the connection between his atmospheric novels and poems and his pre decessors in literary Gothicism, such as the Graveyard Poets, is not often made. The purpose of this paper is to explore that connection more fully in Hardy's poetry. In poems like 'Neutral Tones, 'The Souls of the Slain', an d 'The Voice'--among others--a distinctly Gothic sensibility emerges in the fusion of somber settings, richly ominous and suggestive atmosphere, prete rnatural characters or eerily silent audiences, and macabre situations. The result is not a replay of Romantic Gothicism but its early modern developm ent.