Moments of Vision

Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses is a collection of poems by English poet Thomas Hardy published in 1917. His largest poetic collection (including as it did the wartime sequence 'Poems of War and Patriotism'),[1] Moments of Vision is (for Hardy's poetry) unusually unified in emotional tone, and is considered to include some of the finest work of his late poetic career.[2]

Themes

The key-note (and title) of the collection was given by the opening poem, with its examination of the mystery of consciousness in a material world,[3] setting the stage for the introspective meditation on human feeling that pervades much of the volume.[4] Having successfully achieved an integration of past and present in the Poems 1912-13,[5] Hardy was able to capitalise on his ability to work through long-buried emotions in the present, balancing the vitality of his past visions against the march of time.[6]

Some thirty poems related to his first wife, Emma,[7] while other notable poems included were "The Last Signal", on William Barnes,[8] and "Logs on the Hearth" about his recently deceased sister.[9]

Influence
  • Virginia Woolf took Hardy's phrase as a key to the occasions of heightened intensity that gave meaning to life: "the year is marked by moments of great intensity. Hardy's 'moments of vision'".[10]

See also

References
  1. M. Seymour-Smith, Thomas Hardy (London 1994) p. 797
  2. I. Ousby, The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English (CUP 1995) p. 641
  3. M. Seymour-Smith, Thomas Hardy (London 1994) p. 849-50
  4. I. Ousby, The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English (CUP 1995) p. 641
  5. J. C. Brown, A Journey into Thomas Hardy's Poetry (London 1989) p. 162
  6. J. Lucas, Modern English Poetry: From Hardy to Hughes (London 1986) p. 47
  7. M. Seymour-Smith, Thomas Hardy (London 1994) p. 848
  8. I. Ousby, The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English (CUP 1995) p. 641
  9. J. Lucas, Modern English Poetry: From Hardy to Hughes (London 1986) p. 48 and p. 33
  10. H. Lee, Virginia Woolf (London 1996) p. 319


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