ABSTRACT
Although readers of poetry have tended to describe Hardy as a naturalist, a pessimist, a traditionalist, or even as a true Victorian, his poetry is heraldry of Modernism, though he is not necessarily categorized in the Modernist canon usually associated with poets like T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats or E. Pound. The discussion held on his poetry throughout this study makes it clear that he shares some characteristics peculiar to Modernist poets: ruptures in language, ambiguity, obscurity, a problematized concept of the self, expressed through multiplied voices, and, an anxiety over the attempt to give sense to the external world. Hardy’s poetry is both mimetic and non-mimetic. This characteristic of Hardy’s poetry implies the presence of linguistic tensions and contradictions that appear in Modernist poetry in general. Hardy’s poems present themselves as a challenge to phonocentrism and metaphysics of presence. The crisis of representation in Hardy’s poetry testifies to his status as a threshold figure who nods toward Modernism.
