The Strain of Pessimism in the Poetry

This book presents Thomas Hardy and E. A. Robinson as two coterminous poets and outstanding figures on the English and American literary scenes at the beginning of the twentieth century. A number of critics have explored the similarities in the works of both Hardy and Robinson. Such critics as Ellsworth Barnard, Edwin Fussell, Estelle Kaplan, and Yvor Winters have found in the works of both poets an intensity of dramatic action, a remarkable control of idiom and structure and a sense of realism, which make Hardy and Robinson two of the most prominent figures writing in the last decade of the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth centuries.