Through the winter of 1912–13, the 72-year-old Thomas Hardy wrote 21 elegiac poems after the sudden death of his wife. The following summer a little-known 26-year-old American poet, T. S. Eliot, arrived in London. The two writers and their starting points appear to be opposites: one rural and traditional, the other cosmopolitan and avant-garde. Yet within a generation they would be seen by F. R. Leavis (New Bearings in English Poetry, 1932) as joint creators of a revolution which, in Eliot’s words, would enable English poetry ‘to escape the rhetorical… to recover… the accents of direct speech’ (1917) and to be taken seriously as a contemporary cultural force. There would prove to be close parallels between their quests to render complex experience coherent.
By definition, if a revolution in poetry is needed, something must be rotten in the state of the art. Eliot was not alone in believing that ‘The situation of poetry in 1909 or 1910 was stagnant to a degree difficult for any young poet of today to imagine’ (1954). What was the root cause of this ‘stagnant’ situation? On the one hand, the 1890s had been dominated by a group of aesthetes known as the Rhymers’ Club, whose poetry disdained their rapidly changing society to dwell on dreamstates and death, as in Ernest Dowson’s ‘Vitae Summa Brevis…’: ‘Out of a misty dream/ Our path emerges for a while, then closes/ Within a dream’ (ll. 6–8).
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