A turning point in the criticism of Hardy’s poetry came in his centenary year, in which W. H. Auden (1940) recorded his indebtedness to Hardy for his own education in matters of poetic technique.
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In a radio interview, Larkin defended his liking for Hardy’s temperament and way of seeing life: ‘He’s not a transcendental writer, he’s not a Yeats, he’s not an Eliot; his subjects are men, the life of men, time and the passing of time, love and the fading of love’.
Larkin freely acknowledges the influence on him of Hardy’s verse, which results in his rejection of Yeats as a poetic model.
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It is a similar kind of response that gave rise to an important study by Donald Davie (1973). Davie feels that ‘in British poetry of the last fifty years (as not in America) the most far-reaching influence, for good or ill, has been not Yeats, still less Eliot or Pound, not Lawrence, but Hardy’, and that this influence has been deleterious.
