Discuss Thomas Hardy as a poet hovering between two worlds, the Victorian and the Modern.

I will note a famous Hardy poem, "The Darkling Thrush," to talk about how Hardy bridged the Victorian and the Modern age. This will involve talking in broad strokes about both eras.

In general, the Victorian period was characterized by optimism. England was the unrivalled great world power during this period, with a navy that dominated the seas. Technology boomed: from railroads to vaccines, life had changed radically from the beginning of the century. It seemed that nothing would stop progress and that the world, under the civilizing influence of European culture, would become a better and better place. By the end of the nineteenth century, when Hardy wrote "The Darkling Thrush," there had not been a major European war in nearly a hundred years, people were living longer and better lives than ever before, and technology seemed unstoppable in its promise. Poets reflected society's faith and optimism and even when doubts, perhaps brought about by Darwinism, crept in, many poets, such as Christina Rosetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Emily Bronte, wrote religious or devotional poems, while poets like Edward Lear and Lewis Carrol penned nonsense verse (this is painting in the broadest possible strokes: of course, many poets also wrote about death, despair, etc). Nature was still celebrated as in the Romantic period as a source of inspiration and hope, though perhaps not with the same fervor.

World War I ushered in the Modern age. The horror of that war produced a "Lost Generation" that didn't know where to find hope and meaning after the carnage of that war, with its thousands and thousands of lives wasted on the battlefield. The promise of Victorianism seemed betrayed, and poets like Wilfred Owen reflected the new, dark mood (again, this is painting in the broadest strokes).

Hardy is a bridge figure, for while he still writes in the idiom of the Victorian era, with its emphasis on nature, a poem like "The Darkling Thrush" anticipates the hopelessness and fatalism of the Moderns. Rather than find hope and inspiration in the song of the thrush, the narrator can only wonder at it. Nature doesn't fill him with hope, nor does he have religious faith. The poet is simply alienated from the bird's hope:

So little cause for carolings

      Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestrial things

      Afar or nigh around,

That I could think there trembled through

      His happy good-night air

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

      And I was unaware.