Votary of the Muse

Abstract This chapter presents a synoptic account of Hardy’s ideas about poetry, drawing on his fiction, on extracts from his diary included in the Life, and on his poems about poetry and about other poets such as Shelley and Keats. It considers in detail his short story ‘An Imaginative Woman’ (1894), which features two poets, and dramatizes the schism between the spiritual or poetic and the material or commercial. Like the heroine of this story, in his twenties Hardy came to consider himself a ‘votary of the muse’, and this chapter explores the gulf between the exalted vision of the poetic implicit in this phrase and the drab, disillusioned, anti-romantic aspects of his early poems. It offers close readings of two of Hardy’s most revealing poems about poetry, ‘Moments of Vision’ (1917) and ‘The Vatican: Sala delle Muse’ (1901).