Thomas Hardy's The Romantic Tradition In Modern English Poetry

The poems of Moments of Grace draw attention to the way in which this “specifically verbal intelligence” is inscribed in the powerful discourses of Romanticism and religious belief. All of Jennings’s poems are based on an aesthetic which assumes a spiritual view of the universe and the possibility of visionary transcendence. In this respect, they differ from the poems of those twentieth century poets who deny the possibility of visionary transcendence or explain the experience in more secular terms.
The critic Geoffrey Harvey in his book The Romantic Tradition in Modern English Poetry describes the continuance of the English Romantic tradition by distinguishing Wordsworthian qualities in the poetry of Thomas Hardy, John Betjeman and Philip Larkin (Harvey 9). He spots out that Hardy’s “existentialist philosophy can

In this faithful representation of the relationship between perceiver and perceived, she focuses on the way a sequence of associations derive from visual impressions: “Item, a cloud and how it changes shape,/Now a pink balloon , then a white shift/From a Victorian doll” (470)
The poem can be understood as a part of the attempt to achieve a sense of order by elucidating the different methods used to make sense of experience. The attempt to reduce the creative experience to a catalogue of materials for art is similar to the attempt in “I Count the Moments” and “A Weather Spell” to reduce experience to visible elements which can momentarily be encompassed by acceptable, reassuring forms. The imagery in these poems suggests the necessity of control so that the essence of what the speaker is describing can be captured, but “the forms won’t keep one pattern long”(433)
As the speaker continues to describe the mind in the act of perception, she shows subjective perspectives modify the way objects are