A common theme in both Hardy's "Arcadia" and Stoppard's "Arcadia" is the presence of landscape and place. Both are equally used to explore broader themes and concerns prevalent throughout the works. For Arcadia, the landscape is used primarily to present some of the common topics and ideas throughout the work, such as classicism versus romanticism, chaos theory, and how time affects us in “Poems 1912-” by Hardy. 1913", landscape and place bring together past and present and act to demonstrate Hardy's internal feelings regarding the loss of his wife Emma Lavinia Guifford on 27 November 1912. As both works use landscape and place to present these broader concerns, the similarities between the uses are evident. however, many differences can also be found due to the nature of the work and its messages. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned". ?Get an original essay One of.The clearest use of landscape and place in Hardy's poems of 1912-1913 is to understand the death of his wife.Hardy met his wife, Emma Lavinia Guifford, in north Cornwall, while he was there to repair St Juliot's Church However, once married, the couple became unhappy until eventually she died while waiting and Hardy began to regret their estrangement. However, Stoppard uses the landscape and location of Arcadia to demonstrate the theme of Classicism versus Romanticism, the topics within it and what it entails. Stoppard does this by highlighting the contrast between Lady Croom's and Noakes' ideal garden." Lady Croom describes her garden as “a picture” “the slopes are green and gentle. The trees are grouped amicably at intervals that highlight them” “– in short, it is nature as God intended it.” Lady Croom describes her garden as “tastefully arranged; and tidy. This is the representation of classicism, or the “Enlightenment”, the belief that everything can be solved rationally and logically. Noakes, however, proposes a garden with “an eruption of dark forest and towering cliffs, of ruins where there was never a house.” Noakes' ideal landscape represents the Romantic movement, which was a more artistic and emotional movement. It is ironic that Lady Croom describes her structured garden as “nature as God intended” because nature is chaotic and messy. The Romantic style addresses the chaotic manner of nature, with Noakes arguing that "irregularity is the main principle of the picturesque style". Hardy similarly describes nature as chaotic; in “Beeny Cliff” Hardy describes a “wild and strange western shore.” He also uses a repeated "ay" sound to demonstrate the sound of the sea and seagulls; “The pale stables lay beneath us, and the waves seemed far away.” However, in Arcadia, although Noakes' garden is more chaotic, as nature should be, it is still not purely natural because he is still the one creating the chaos and therefore is unnatural. This may demonstrate that Stoppard is arguing that as a human race we will always strive for order and that chaos and nature cannot be created. He also shows a contempt for Romanticism when he describes the transition from Romanticism to Classicism as the "decline from thought to feeling", a "decline" which he suggests is undesirable. However, it could also show that there is still order in the chaos, an idea that can be found elsewhere in the play when Thomasina declares to Septimus "if there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for a like a bluebell" "Don't we believe that nature is written in numbers?". It also suggests that you can.