''Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses'' is a collection of poems by
English
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poet
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, including the poetry of William Word ...
published in 1917. His largest poetic collection (including as it did the wartime sequence 'Poems of War and Patriotism'), ''Moments of Vision'' is (for Hardy's poetry) unusually unified in emotional tone, and is considered to include some of the finest work of his late poetic career.
Themes
The key-note (and title) of the collection was given by the opening poem, with its examination of the mystery of consciousness in a material world, setting the stage for the introspective meditation on human feeling that pervades much of the volume. Having successfully achieved an integration of past and present in the ''
Poems 1912-13
Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in a ...
'', Hardy was able to capitalise on his ability to work through long-buried emotions in the present, balancing the vitality of his past visions against the march of time.
Some thirty poems related to his first wife,
Emma
Emma may refer to:
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Film
* Emma (1932 film), ''Emma'' (1932 film), a comedy-drama film by Clarence Brown
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* Emma (1996 TV film), '' ...
, while other notable poems included were "The Last Signal", on
William Barnes
William Barnes (22 February 1801 – 7 October 1886) was an English polymath, writer, poet, philologist, priest, mathematician, engraving artist and inventor. He wrote over 800 poems, some in Dorset dialect, and much other work, including a co ...
, and "Logs on the Hearth" about his recently deceased sister.
Influence
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Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf (; ; 25 January 1882 28 March 1941) was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.
Woolf was born i ...
took Hardy's phrase as a key to the occasions of heightened intensity that gave meaning to life: "the year is marked by moments of great intensity. Hardy's 'moments of vision'".
[H. Lee, ''Virginia Woolf'' (London 1996) p. 319]
See also
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William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth (7 April 177023 April 1850) was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication ''Lyrical Ballads'' (1798).
Wordsworth's ' ...
*
World War I in literature
Literature about World War I is generally thought to include poems, novels and drama; diaries, letters, and memoirs are often included in this category as well. Although the canon continues to be challenged, the texts most frequently taught in scho ...
References
External links
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''Moments of Vision'':Texts''Moments of Vision'': Audio selection
1917 poems
English poetry collections
Poetry by Thomas Hardy
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