Hardy's Poems: Writing Memory to Resist Annihilation

Abstract In Hardy's poetry memory provides a fundamental intermediary locus poeticus where different selves meet, communicate and even collide. Starting from a process of defamiliarization of the language, his poetics re-vision what was partially perceived as reality and move within a poetical limbo between life and death, where the text gives hospitality to the ghosts of the dead, while becoming their hostage. The nostalgic poems are oriented towards an aesthetic but also psychoanalytical solving of absence, by iterating but also repressing loss, whereas the “congestioned” poems portray several Freudian obsessive ghosts who try to defy the flow of time, in order to annihilate the second and final death.