Abstract: In their poetry, Thomas Hardy and William Barnes draw on familiar linguistic roots and traditional dialect terms as they coin new words—thus combining innovation and retrospection. Their neologisms elucidate two paradoxical Victorian phenomena: a historical perspective that involves both longing for and alienation from the past, and a local perspective that aligns regional identity both with and against national identity. By closely examining these writers’ poetic responses to loss, this essay demonstrates that neology recalibrates the ways in which identity coheres, or fails to cohere, across time and space. Such questions, it turns out, also lie at the heart of elegy.
Veronica Alfano (2025) studied this question.