Hardy and Frost are worth comparing because they occupy equivalent positions on the current poetic scene. They converge, first of all, because of their adversary relation to modernist poetry—the kind of poetry represented by Yeats, Pound, and Eliot; so that a taste for Hardy and Frost becomes for many readers a vote against modernism. Hardy and Frost also converge in that they are known as nature poets at a time when modernist poets have largely rejected nature as a subject for poetry. Yet Hardy and Frost write a new kind of nature poetry, which they define through its resistance to the pathetic fallacy—to the idea, as Wordsworth puts it, that mind and nature are admirably suited to each other so that the landscape can validly give back the meaning the poet projects into it.

As an example of the new nature poetry, let us look at one of Hardy's best poems, "Neutral Tones," which was written as early as 1867. Here is the first stanza:

We stood by a pond that winter day,