Thomas Hardy's Self-Transcendence In "Poems Of 1912-1913"

In the history of English literature, Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) is both a great novelist and a successful poet. As a poet, Hardy plays an important role in the development of English poetry. He inherits and develops Romantic poetic tradition and paves the way for the development of Modernist poetry.Throughout his life, Hardy has written nearly one thousand poems, among which "Poems of 1912-1913," a sequence of twenty-one elegiac poems written after the death of his wife Emma, is his greatest poetic achievement. This sequence of poems is generally considered among the finest of Hardy's poems because they present Hardy's truthful inner world by the direction diction, flank language and the fidelity to Hardy's life and emotion. However, the studies of "Poems of 1912-1913" at home and abroad are rather limited. They mainly focus on merely one or two aspects of Hardy's emotions in this sequence of poems. Actually, these elegies truthfully and comprehensively exhibits Hardy's rich and complex inner world, especially Hardy's self-transcendence.Taking Hardy's emotional and psychological entanglement with Emma as the motif, the present thesis comprehensively exhibits Hardy's transcendence of himself in "Poems of 1912-1913." The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 gives a brief introduction to the background of "Poems of 1912-1913," such as the marriage of Hardy and Emma, Emma's sudden death and Hardy's writing of "Poems of 1912-1913." Some critical studies on these poems are also included in this chapter. Chapter 2 analyzes the great loss in Hardy's mind. Hardy's great loss is embodied by his complex feelings formed after Emma's sudden death and it is these feelings that lead Hardy to a lost world. Chapter 3 focuses on Hardy's unconscious activity. In his unconsciousness, Hardy constructs images of Emma in different worlds. However, Hardy and the constructed Emma are separate from each other: he is separate from both the young Emma in the past and the ghost Emma in the virtual world. Chapter 4 explores the psychological problem revealed by Hardy's unconscious construction, i.e., the disintegration between Hardy and the anima. For the disintegration, Hardy discusses it in his poems and discovers the way to solve this psychological problem. Thus, Chapter 5 points out how Hardy solves his problem through the integron with his anima figure Emma and gets consolation in the lost world. Hence, Hardy extricates from the lost world and ends this sequence of poems with his final reconciliation. From the great loss to the final reconciliation, in "Poems of 1912-1913," Hardy experiences a transcendence of himself.