The Synthetic Imagination: An Approach to the Poetry of Thomas Hardy

Abstract

A reading of Hardy's verse clearly illustrates the poet's tragic view of things and his longing and earnest search for a "cure," for something that would make man's life, in the face of the inevitable destruction wrought by time, endurable and, perhaps, meaningful. It is my contention that the poet did find such a "cure," and that he found it in the power of the imagination to synthesize the experience of the past, present, and future as known by the individual into a whole that transcends the tragedy of temporal life. Through his imagination, the poet attained an attitude of reconciliation to the seeming absurdity of mortal endeavor in a ceaselessly changing universe. Hardy's work is finally positive in attitude and can be of service to all earnest men perplexed by the ultimately unanswerable questions of mortal existence. It can help such men to live their lives without falling into negation or hopelessness. [From Introduction]