The Selected Poems of Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) always regarded novel-writing as a necessary means of making money. His vocation was poetry.

Apart from his genius, the sheer scale of Hardy’s achievement is extraordinary: more than 900 poems produced in sixty-odd years, the last ones, written in his seventies, deeper and stronger than the first. He wrote about any and everything – London and Dorset, war and nature, marriage as well as love – in poems that draw their lifeblood from ballads and folksong. They impress us as being his own local rhythms of thought, conveying passion uninhibited by good manners, in a style “reduced to riches”. As well as millions of readers, poets as different as W.H. Auden and John Betjeman have acknowledged a debt to Hardy. Perhaps, as Philip Larkin has suggested, because this least imitable of writers “gave them confidence to feel in their own way … One can read him again and again and still be surprised.”