I said to my soul, be still, and wait
                               without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong                   
                   thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong 
                   thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope  
                       are all in the waiting...

At this point, I should confess that my enthusiasm for Hardy's poems came as a relatively late discovery, whereas I was simply overwhelmed by my first unaided attempt to read something of Eliot's. That event (I felt it to be nothing less than an event, at the time) took place in the library of the Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg, when I came on two lines from his "Whispers of Immortality" in Poems: 1920:  "And breastless creatures under ground/ Leaned backward with a lipless grin" — a sequence of phrases that made it impossible for me to continue sitting at my desk. Instead, I found myself wandering about the lawn, trying to get over what I had just read. I realise now that much of the power of the lines springs largely from their extraordinary assimilation of life and death to one another: the skeletons "lean backward", like people exchanging jokes in a pub or at a party. But how can they behave in that fashion, given the loss and ruin they have already suffered? And to what end do they do it? From that moment I was hooked, a devotee, compelled for decades afterwards to have unbidden lines and entire verses from one Eliot poem or another constantly passing through my head at random moments, as if nothing would ever be able to banish them. By comparison, Hardy — inasmuch as I knew his verse — struck me as something of a simpleton, a bumpkin, a striker-off of jingles, of tortuous rhymes and phrases, an eager deliverer of solemn queries masquerading as deep thought.

Since then, my feeling about the two poets has gone through something akin to a revolution. It is plain to me still that many ineffective or sub-standard poems are included in Hardy's Collected Poems — something that cannot be said about the roughly comparable volumes by Eliot, which are much more finely winnowed. However, while remaining convinced that the best of Eliot's work will continue to be read as far into the future as anyone might care to guess, I now believe that Hardy, who was happy to declare that "all we can do is write on the old themes in the old styles", and who described critics as "parasites no less noxious than autograph hunters", is ultimately the more rewarding of the two poets. The combination in Eliot's early verse of bravura and desolation, of high spirits and self-doubt, of sexual humility and moral hauteur, of snobbery and self-abnegation — not to speak of the plaiting together of all these moods and appetites, and others, with a hunger for both religious certitude and public success — was indeed revolutionary, as many critics in succeeding generations were eager to declare. (Though never quite in the terms I have just used.) And in the meantime, though his life on earth was long since over, Hardy's verse seemed to plod on indomitably, occasionally striking his readers with a fine line here and a worse one there, while all too often revealing the author's remarkable gift for never seeming to know the difference between these two possibilities. 

What I did not notice in Hardy's poetry then, or dismissed glibly because it seemed to me so deliberately "unsmart", was how much steel there is in it. Nor did I pick up on its tenderness. Or its proud and close attention to detail. Or the poet's singular capacity, almost as if he were working in filigree, to create a sense of surprise and elevation by way of both his most elaborate and his most humble-seeming rhymes and rhythms; as he did also with the patterns constantly being drawn and redrawn on the page by the varying lengths of his lines. Yes, there are failures and absurdities in the poems — how could anyone deny it? — but they are more than balanced by utterances that fuse the speaker, the reader and the people figured in the poems into a unity from which none of them can escape. And from which they would not wish to escape, if only they knew themselves better.