ABSTRACT
Thomas Hardy draws on a relatively obscure William Wordsworth poem and frequently overlooked strain of his predecessor’s work—the acknowledgment of nature’s harshness—to revise the poet’s general representation of nature and the dominant Victorian view of that representation. Hardy emphasizes that because many of Wordsworth’s beliefs about nature and its relationship to humanity are incompatible with a Darwinian world, his philosophy may be on its way toward extinction. Hardy’s resigned belief that Wordsworthian transcendence in nature was irrecoverable after Charles Darwin is far removed from Matthew Arnold and George Eliot’s promotion of culture and sympathy, respectively, and even from Robert Louis Stevenson’s more tentative attempt to recover the poet’s spiritual heights through art. Exploring Hardy’s engagement with Wordsworth’s and Darwin’s interacting influences in his fiction, poetry, autobiographical writing, and marginalia will reveal his preoccupation with the relationship between literal and literary survival.
