ABSTRACT
The ideas and emotions which Hardy cautiously termed his “tentative metaphysic” took shape so gradually that no point in his career can be indicated where the fatalism of his youth gave way to the determinism of his old age. There are anticipations of his final convictions in his earliest writings and vestiges of early speculation in his latest. Nor does the publication of his first volume of poems in 1898 mark a clear division, since Hardy wrote poetry in his youth, turned to prose only when he could not find an audience for his verse, never renounced his intention to be a poet during the quarter of a century of novel-writing, and, abandoning fiction, reverted to poetry at last. It is impossible, therefore, to divide his career into “periods,” and perhaps the question had best be left where he left it in the contrasting titles of the two volumes of his memoirs—titles (as their muted despondency makes evident) indubitably suggested by himself: “The Early Life” and “The Later Years.”
