Reading Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems

This introductory study is part of the Literature Insights series, aimed at students and the general reader. Thomas Hardy is unique in English literature as a major novelist who is also a major poet. His collected poetry is among the most distinctive bodies of verse in the language, and includes such pinnacles of the lyric tradition as ‘The Darkling Thrush’, the haunted love-elegies written in memory of his first wife Emma, and such instantly recognizable titles as ‘Drummer Hodge’, ‘A Trampwoman’s Tragedy’, and ‘Convergence of the Twain’. It is also among the most controversial. Ever since his poetry first appeared in the collection Wessex Poems in 1898, readers and critics alike have stumbled over its awkwardnesses or been seduced by its idiosyncratic music, have celebrated its unprecedented formal inventiveness or deplored its perceived lack of ambition. It has been variously read as an archetype of the Victorian intellectual odyssey, as the work of a proto-modernist, and as the fountainhead of contemporary British verse. At once traditional and modern, blending artifice and emotion, it remains a critical enigma. This study guide sets Hardy’s poetry in the context of his life, times and literary heritage, and will help students to understand, through a close reading of selected poems, both the challenge it offers to criticism and the elusive power it continues to exert over each new generation of readers. All Hardy's collections are introduced including Wessex Poems, Time’s Laughingstocks, Moments of Vision, Satires of Circumstance and Winter Words.Neil Wenborn graduated in English from Magdalene College, Cambridge, and worked at the Bodleian Library in Oxford before pursuing a career in publishing, becoming Editorial Director of one of the UK’s leading independent publishers. His works include biographies of Haydn, Stravinsky and Dvořák. He is co-editor of the highly respected History Today Companion to British History (Collins & Brown) and A Dictionary of Jewish–Christian Relations (Cambridge University Press), as well as of the poetry anthology Contourlines: New Responses to Landscape in Word and Image (Salt Publishing). A collection of his poetry, Firedoors, is published by Rockingham Press. Neil Wenborn is the author of Jane Austen: Emma in the Literature Insights series.