While most literary studies of Victorian childhood tend to focus on the novel and on narrative generally, Ruderman deals exclusively with poetry, and the theoretical framing of his study is different ...from much that has been done in the field. In the absence of historical context or semantic unity, infancy loses its chronological dimension; Ruderman follows Agamben in regarding it as a position traversable in either direction without necessarily constituting regression-a notion that underlies Klein's theory of infancy as an "always available state, not something one passes through" (qtd. in Ruderman 56). The child is the self; it is an emblem of privacy, immortality, cognitive hesitancy, poetry, silence, an interrupted beginning, development and growth, separation anxiety (as in birth trauma), maternal protection, beauty, the pastoral mode, the ballad form, and so on.
Thomas Hardy Benziman, Galia
Victorian poetry,
10/2023, Volume:
61, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
A compelling reading of Hardy's entanglement in the natural environment that questions anthropocentric assumptions appears in Simon Armitage's chapter "Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres," ...published in his new collection of essays, A Vertical Art: Chi. The weather in Hardy, Armitage argues, is "nearly always portent and symbol, and often plays a political role"; in this volume in particular, "the unpredictable and ungovernable character of the skies and seasons is a rascally and rebellious presence ... an irrepressible voice and one that speaks with the elemental authority of the natural world" (p. 208). Humanto-animal gestures are observed in some of the poems. ...Armitage makes an interesting point about how in "Last Week in October," the poet's depiction of a spider's web "feels as if Hardy has anticipated Yeats's 'Man has created death' declaration by four or five years" (p. 209). ...we cannot determine if "A Light Snow-Fall after Frost," one of the poems on which Armitage focuses, is a "poem of projection or of reflection, and whether Hardy is commenting on the ageing process from a position of anticipation or of experience" (p. 214).
