ABSTRACT
Hardy's antagonism to the doctrinal aspects of Browning's poetry is well known. As he bluntly remarked in a letter of 1899, the longer he lived the more did Browning seem 'the literary puzzle of the 19th century. How could smug Christian optimism worthy of a dissenting grocer find a ·place inside a man who was so vast a seer & feeler when on neutral ground' (1978-88, ii, 216). Hardy's resistance to Browning's optimism, however, did not keep him from reading and rereading Browning's poems over a 60-year period, valuing them highly, and making some of them part of his vocabulary of feeling. In 1894, as numerous pencilled markings attest, his interest in Browning's poetry was intensified when Mrs Henniker gave him a volume of Selections from the Poetical Works of Robert Browning. It has been suggested that his reading of this volume influenced Hardy's decision to abandon the writing of novels and return to poetry (Pinion, 192). Certainly the unpoetical diction and rough rhythms, the elaborate stanza forms and forced rhymes, and the dramatic character of many of Hardy's poems suggest the example of Browning.
