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

The common critical understanding of Thomas Hardy as a modern existentialist, anti-Romantic cynic, and even philosophical nihilist is only partly accurate; it is incomplete because it typically does not consider Hardy in another important aspect of his work and thought: as a Romantic exponent of Gothic sensibility and aestheticism. While much is made of his richly evocative use of setting and nature to prove Hardy's intellectual and emotional pessimism, the connection between his atmospheric novels and poems and his predecessors 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', and 'The Voice'--among others--a distinctly Gothic sensibility emerges in the fusion of somber settings, richly ominous and suggestive atmosphere, preternatural characters or eerily silent audiences, and macabre situations. The result is not a replay of Romantic Gothicism but its early modern development.