"My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own"
About this Quote
Hardy is smuggling a big demand into a sentence that sounds modest: the poet has to be both a vessel and a person. "Emotion of all the ages" isn’t a quaint Victorian platitude; it’s an argument against trendy cleverness and narrow self-expression. He’s insisting that art earns its keep by tapping the long, recurring weather of human feeling: grief, longing, jealousy, awe, dread. Not as museum-piece sentiment, but as something recognizably lived across centuries.
Then comes the twist that saves the line from piety: "the thought of his own". Hardy draws a bright border between feeling and thinking. Emotion, for him, is the shared inheritance; thought is where the writer has to risk specificity and even unpopularity. In other words: don’t just recycle the canon’s moods, and don’t confuse personal confession with original insight. The poet’s job is to make ancient feelings newly intelligible through a contemporary mind.
Context matters. Hardy wrote in a late-19th/early-20th-century Britain where certainties were cracking: Darwin, industrial modernity, class upheaval, a thinning faith. His novels and poems are haunted by that dislocation, full of people living inside timeless passions while colliding with new systems that don’t care. The subtext is almost defensive: if the old emotional repertoire is still valid, the artist can face modern skepticism without surrendering to it. The line also reads like Hardy staking a claim against modernism’s coming coolness: keep the deep currents, but let the brain be unmistakably yours.
Then comes the twist that saves the line from piety: "the thought of his own". Hardy draws a bright border between feeling and thinking. Emotion, for him, is the shared inheritance; thought is where the writer has to risk specificity and even unpopularity. In other words: don’t just recycle the canon’s moods, and don’t confuse personal confession with original insight. The poet’s job is to make ancient feelings newly intelligible through a contemporary mind.
Context matters. Hardy wrote in a late-19th/early-20th-century Britain where certainties were cracking: Darwin, industrial modernity, class upheaval, a thinning faith. His novels and poems are haunted by that dislocation, full of people living inside timeless passions while colliding with new systems that don’t care. The subtext is almost defensive: if the old emotional repertoire is still valid, the artist can face modern skepticism without surrendering to it. The line also reads like Hardy staking a claim against modernism’s coming coolness: keep the deep currents, but let the brain be unmistakably yours.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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