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
- William Wordsworth
- World War I in literature
References
- ^ M. Seymour-Smith, Thomas Hardy (London 1994) p. 797
- ^ I. Ousby, The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English (CUP 1995) p. 641
- ^ M. Seymour-Smith, Thomas Hardy (London 1994) p. 849-50
- ^ I. Ousby, The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English (CUP 1995) p. 641
- ^ J. C. Brown, A Journey into Thomas Hardy's Poetry (London 1989) p. 162
- ^ J. Lucas, Modern English Poetry: From Hardy to Hughes (London 1986) p. 47
- ^ M. Seymour-Smith, Thomas Hardy (London 1994) p. 848
- ^ I. Ousby, The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English (CUP 1995) p. 641
- ^ J. Lucas, Modern English Poetry: From Hardy to Hughes (London 1986) p. 48 and p. 33
- ^ H. Lee, Virginia Woolf (London 1996) p. 319
External links
- Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses at Project Gutenberg
- Moments of Vision:Texts
- Moments of Vision: Audio selection
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- The Poor Man and the Lady (1867)
- Desperate Remedies (1871)
- Under the Greenwood Tree (1872)
- A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873)
- Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)
- The Hand of Ethelberta (1876)
- The Return of the Native (1878)
- The Trumpet-Major (1880)
- A Laodicean (1881)
- Two on a Tower (1882)
- The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)
- The Woodlanders (1887)
- Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891/92)
- Jude the Obscure (1895)
- The Well-Beloved (1897)
- Wessex Tales (1888)
- A Group of Noble Dames (1891)
- Life's Little Ironies (1894)
- A Changed Man and Other Tales (1913)
- "The Three Strangers" (1883)
- "A Mere Interlude" (1885)
- "Alicia's Diary" (1887)
- "Barbara of the House of Grebe" (1891)
- "The Fiddler of the Reels" (1893)
- "A Tragedy of Two Ambitions" (1894)
- Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898)
- Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)
- Time's Laughingstocks (1909)
- Poems 1912–13
- Satires of Circumstance (1914)
- Moments of Vision (1917)
- Late Lyrics (1922)
- Human Shows (1925)
- Winter Words (1928)
- "Neutral Tones" (1898)
- "The Darkling Thrush" (1900)
- "The Ruined Maid" (1901)
- "The Respectable Burgher" (1901)
- "The Man He Killed" (1902)
- "A Trampwoman's Tragedy" (1903)
- "The Convergence of the Twain" (1915)
- "The Blinded Bird" (1916)
- The Dynasts (1904–1908)
- The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall (1923)
- Thomas Hardy's Wessex
- Winter Words (song cycle)
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