CALEB SALEEBY wrote to Hardy in 1914 to ask whether he was correct in observing the similarity of his philosophical position in The Dynasts (1904) to that of Bergson in Creative Evolution (1907; published in English 1911). A few letters later, Saleeby’s question about the philosophical position of the verse-drama had been reformulated by Hardy as an enquiry into the phenomenology of belief:

Half my time (particularly when I write verse) I believe – in the modern use of the word – not only in the things Bergson does, but in spectres, mysterious voices, intuitions, omens, dreams, haunted places, etc., etc. But then I do not believe in these things in the old sense of belief any more for that.1

As Hardy adjusts the terms of this enquiry from the philosophical to the phenomenological, he reaches for a new vocabulary. The philosophical ‘things’ of Bergsonian philosophy are exchanged for the familiar phenomena of Hardy’s poetry, ‘spectres, mysterious voices, intuitions’. The abstract language of philosophy is adjusted, reinterpreted, and then replaced by the mysterious presences of poetry.