Product Description

Thomas Hardy started composing poetry in the heyday of Tennyson and Browning. He was still writing with unimpaired power sixty years later, when Eliot and Yeats were the leading names in the field. His extraordinary stamina and a consistent individuality of style and vision made him a survivor, immune to literary fashion. At the start of the twenty-first century his reputation stands higher than it ever did, even in his own lifetime. He is now recognised not only as a great poet, but as one who is widely loved. He speaks with directness, humanity and humour to scholarly or ordinary readers alike.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #42525 in Books
• Published on: 1994-05-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 960 pages

Customer Reviews

Hardy was a poetic genius
Hardy is the most under rated poet that Britain ever produced.

Better known for his novels, Hardy always considered himself a poet first and foremost. And after the "un christian" reception that "Jude the Obscure" received, he decided to devote himself fully to poetry, his first love.

Much of his work relates to rural themes, and is wonderful in it's observation of both wildlife, and human nature. And no writer born before or since has possessed an eye for irony that could come near matching Hardy's.

I can't recommend Hardy's poems highly enough. I discovered them many years ago as a sixth form student who had began to doubt the wisdom of my parents and teachers in leading me down the road to Christianity. And when I discovered that Hardy had already been down the same road and expressed all of the same doubts, felt all of the same guilt etc. etc., and that he could express it in such wonderful poetry - I was reassured, amazed, absolved and made to feel a lot better about myself.

No poetry has ever meant so much to me - and almost certainly never will.

Strange Eyed Constellations
Famously, Hardy gave up writing novels after the poor reception given to "Jude the Obscure". He concentrated instead on poetry, presumably muttering "Right!This'll show 'em!", or something similar, through his gritted teeth.

In my opinion, while admitting that, generally speaking, no one ever puts up a statue to a critic, posterity has something to thank the reviewers of "Jude" for. Instead of having yet more of Hardy's static and uninvolving prose describing the moral and physical problems of the rural Wessex townships, kind of a superior "Archers" without the silly voices, we have more of his excellent and varied poetry.

Some of the poems, particularly the war poems like "Drummer Hodge", have justly remained well known, others, such as "At Casterbridge Fair" may not be so familiar, but are equally fine. My own favourite is "Wessex Heights" a wry, sad piece that somehow manages not to be at all depressing.

Taken as a whole, the most striking thing about the poetry here is, perhaps, its modernity. The author's world weary, stoical recognition of the passage of time echoes loudly in our post-religious Twenty First Century.

Hardy's grasp of a dizzying number of poetic forms is impressive.He is (for some reason) regarded as being in the forefront of English novelists, these complete poetic works show he has, most unusually, the range and depth to be considered in the first rank of English poets too.

Thomas Hardy's Collected Poems
Thomas Hardy's poems are a treasure. Every time I read through the 950 poems in the "Collected Poems" I discover another half-dozen that I have somehow managed not to appreciate before. His "Collected Poems" is a must for any library; and the Wordsworth Classics edition is a good one to own.

Wordsworth Classics editions are generally very good--and reliable: their editors don't interfere with their authors' works! (If you read Hardy's "The Mayor of Casterbridge" in a new Penguin edition, you won't read most of the penultimate chapter; the scholarly editor has used an edition, neither the first that Hardy published nor the last that Hardy corrected, which excludes two-thirds--2,656 words--of that chapter.)