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352 The twentieth century: 1900–45
elevated feelings and ideas. In the Modern period, there is a movement
from poetic diction to a new poetic language. Modern poetry contains
language that is closer to the idioms of everyday speech and to a more
diverse range of subject matter. Instead of a single unified poetic diction,
different styles coexist more frequently. This is first noticeable in Hopkins
and Hardy, and continues through Eliot and Auden to Larkin and more
recently to Tony Harrison, Simon Armitage, and Benjamin Zephaniah.
Dialect words, colloquial expressions, specialist terminology, poeticism,
and foreign words may be found in the same poem. Such a rich use of
language expresses a view of reality which is more fluid, uneven,
intertextual than before and which is less patterned and unified. Poetry
has become more polyglot. The language mix reflects a sense that there
is no longer a fixed language of poetry just as there is no longer one
English (if there ever was). Socio-cultural dislocation is reflected in
stylistic mixing, which occurs in the work both of modernist experimental
poets and in many of the more traditional and conservative poets.
LATER HARDY
Few poets better convey the uneasy transition from Victorianism to
Modernism than Thomas Hardy. His novels, written between 1870 and
1895, made him not only the recorder of his distinctive region of ‘Wessex’,
but the explorer of the transition of lives and minds from the age of
traditional values and religious certainties to the age of godlessness and
modern tragedy, a transition sometimes described as ‘the clash of the
modern’. After the hostile reception of his tragic and bitter novel Jude the
Obscure in 1895, he devoted himself largely to poetry and poetic drama
until his death in 1928. In 1898 he published his Wessex Poems, verse that
he had written over the previous thirty years. His poems are largely
traditional in theme, form, and structure, and show a continuity with the
Wordsworthian art of recording the impact of ordinary daily events on an
individual and sensitive mind; they in turn became a major influence on
the work of writers like Robert Graves, W.H. Auden, John Betjeman, and
Philip Larkin. Yet behind Hardy’s verse the unease is plain. The familiar
world is progressively growing darker, more unfamiliar and the drama of
existence is lived in an uncertain, fated, and godless age.