Thomas Hardy's Antiwar Opinion in his Poems, ‘The Man He Killed’, ‘Channel Firing’ and ‘In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’’

Abstract

This paper studies Thomas Hardy's 'antiwar poetry' and endeavors to demonstrate and identify his clear-cut opinion on war, which he consistently, adopts. It explicates how his poetry presents horribly a pessimistic view of man's bellicose stupidity, whilst a few of his other antiwar poems consider him to be triumphantly optimistic in asserting the fact that the good things of everyday life would survive when wars are long forgotten. This study describes Thomas Hardy's great diversity of attitudes which are to a large extent noticeable in his writing (Antiwar Poems), his literary career in general and his critical works. His antiwar poems reveal him to be rather a kind and a gentle person, who is very much aware of the pain; human beings suffer, in their struggle for a decent life. He wrote eleven “antiwar poems”. In this study, three antiwar poems are discussed in order to display Hardy's varied attitudes towards war.

Keywords: Antiwar Poetry, Thomas Hardy & Hardy’s attitudes towards War