SOURCE: “Thomas Hardy and Thomas Gray: The Poet's Currency.” ELH 65, no. 2 (1998): 451-77.

In the following essay, Taylor discusses how Thomas Gray was a key influence in Hardy's aesthetics and thoughts on the public culture, and how Gray's influence convinced Hardy that his highest vocation was not as a novelist, but as a poet.

Why did Hardy, a major novelist, call his novels “mere journeywork” and say that they “have been superseded … by the more important half of my work, the verse”?¹ Consistently, over a writing career of more than 70 years, Hardy maintained that his literary vocation was that of a poet, not a novelist. His novels were what he did for a living; his poetry—enabled by the success of his novels—was what he did for immortality. Where novels for Hardy somehow pander to the society, poems resist it and yet also command it by seeking higher...