‘Space, the Bound of a Solid’: Alice Meynell and Thomas Hardy

The second case study to work with the ideas outlined in chapter 5 uses the highly meta-poetical work of Alice Meynell, together with some of her prose writings, to understand the significance of the sculptural and phenomenological presence of fixed form poems on the printed page. The approach developed from the work of Meynell is then used to uncover in the poetry of Thomas Hardy a somatic poetics that figures an intriguingly material type of lyric transaction through the printed page of the mass-circulated book.