Thomas Hardy, born in rural obscurity in early Victorian Dorset, had become by the time of his death more than eighty years later the most famous writer in the English-speaking world. Hardy thought of himself as a poet all his life, although his poetic career only flowered after he had retired from novel-writing in his mid-fifties. Over the next thirty years he wrote the poems that have established him as one of the great and most enduringly popular English poets of the twentieth century.
His verse touches all the common themes of human existence: birth, childhood, love, marriage, ageing, death. If Hardy's age brings anything to them, it is an old man's ironic and elegiac sense that in life hopes are likely to be defeated and losses sustained, and that the world was not designed for human happiness.
This collection is selected, prepared and edited by Norman Page, editor of the Thomas Hardy Annual and the Thomas Hardy Journal and is a Vice-President of the Thomas Hardy Society. Norman Page's introduction and notes illuminate Hardy's central place in the tradition of English poetry.
About the Author
An English Victorian author of novels, poems, and short stories, Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) is best known for the classic books Far from the Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure. Set mostly in the semi-imagined region of Wessex, Hardy’s fictional works retain their popularity thanks to an accessible style, Romantic plots, and richly drawn characters.
