Haunted Hardy

"Hardy was a ghost-ridden author. He described himself as a 'ghost-seer', and in his poetry he constantly writes about the spirits of the dead, whether people known to him, imagined ghosts, or the more abstract spirits who might appear before the bar of history for judgement. This study argues that the idea of haunting is central to his work: in his conception of his 'second' career as a poet; in the phantom of the lost child which permeates his writings (and reproduces itself in the accusation that he fathered a bastard child with his cousin); in his elegaic writings and intertextual…