Moments of Vision

Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses is a collection of poems by English poet Thomas Hardy published in 1917. His largest poetic collection (including as it did the wartime sequence 'Poems of War and Patriotism'),^[1] Moments of Vision is (for Hardy's poetry) unusually unified in emotional tone, and is considered to include some of the finest work of his late poetic career.^[2]

Themes

The key-note (and title) of the collection was given by the opening poem, with its examination of the mystery of consciousness in a material world,^[3] setting the stage for the introspective meditation on human feeling that pervades much of the volume.^[4] Having successfully achieved an integration of past and present in the Poems 1912-13,^[5] Hardy was able to capitalise on his ability to work through long-buried emotions in the present, balancing the vitality of his past visions against the march of time.^[6]

Some thirty poems related to his first wife, Emma,^[7] while other notable poems included were "The Last Signal", on William Barnes,^[8] and "Logs on the Hearth" about his recently deceased sister.^[9]

Influence

• Virginia Woolf took Hardy's phrase as a key to the occasions of heightened intensity that gave meaning to life: "the year is marked by moments of great intensity. Hardy's 'moments of vision'".^[10]

See also

• William Wordsworth
• World War I in literature