"Small Prose Poems": Poetic form in Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Thomas Hardy was often reproached-notably by his contemporaries-for the defects and lack of polish and elegance of his written style. Starting from this criticism, this paper analyses the major characteristics of Hardy's style, showing its radical-and fertile-discontinuity. Alongside with awkward passages when the narrator launches into abstract meditations against morals, society or fate, other moments can be found in his novels when the author briefly seems to forsake any concern for realistic description, and to suggest instead enchanted instants of communion between his characters and the world of nature, which transfigure the whole of perception. These are the moments when the poet is revealed within the novel-writer-a poet intent on seizing and rendering what Maurice Merleau-Ponty called "the prose of the world". Using both phenomenology and close-readings of the text, this paper tries to show the major characteristics of Hardy's idiosyncratic voice, which is also distinctly heard in his poetry.